Sal Makes Games

Or at least he tries to. This is my dev-blog, where I'll be trying to showcase progress on my game projects as they develop. Hopefully it'll help keep me motivated to continue them, rather than keep letting them stop half way through.

[salmakesgames]

A hex grid library for Unity

I just put up a bunch of enhancements to my Hex Grid Unity library, which now features methods for rotating hexes around each other or the origin hex, and newly added XML comments for an improved Intellisense experience. As well as all of it’s original features for working with a Hex based grid/coordinate system in Unity.

It’s released under the Apache license, so anyone who wants to use it in their own projects can do so as they like.

[salmakesgames]

I now have it successfully round tripping from the main game to the science minigame, so that’s a thing. The more I think about it tho the less sure I am it’s worth even having a science minigame, so...

[salmakesgames]

Spent the last couple of days moving things over from Unity ScriptableObjects to XML files, as well as starting to move the ability logic over from c# into Lua scripts. All in the service of eventual modding support.

It’s going fairly well, if a bit slowly. The worst part is this is one of those times where the best sign of progress tends to be “everything’s working the same as it was before I started” which is not the most motivating.

If anyone’s curious, I’m using MoonSharp for the Lua interop.

[salmakesgames]

And you can now build improvements in your city, as well as see what improvements you’ve already built. The UI could definitely use a little work but it’s passable for now. Tooltips will help a lot whenever I get around to setting those up.

Kind of avoiding it cuz I know they’re gonna hook into every little subsystem and I don’t want to have to change them every time I fiddle with something else.

[salmakesgames]

Got simulated (by which I currently mean entirely random) combat working, and a rudimentary dialog to show off the results. Needs some work, but for now it’ll do.

[salmakesgames]

More UI work, getting the combat cards on screen.

[salmakesgames]

An approximation of what a round of engagement will look like, dice wise. The motion is a lot smoother in game than in these gifs, by the way.

So, I want to talk about these dice a little bit. Without getting into too much detail about the as-yet unimplemented combat minigame, basically each combat will consist of three rounds (assuming no one dies after the first two) and each round both sides will be rolling a bunch of these dice, the specific number dependent on what they’re doing and their leader’s stats.

Each die has a 50% chance of being a success (denoted by an X face) and then stuff will happen depending on the total number of successes each side rolled, as well as what specific actions were chosen.

Now, it would be fair to ask why I’m going through all the trouble of simulating physics dice when I could just generate a (pseudo) random number.

The main reason is feedback. I want it to be clear to the player what’s happening, why the actions they chose are having the effect they are. The easiest way I could think of to show that was with visual dice (which is no surprise, since this combat system was admittedly inspired by a tabletop RPG.)

Of course, I could’ve just generated the numbers the usual way and then animated little dice to show it, rather than going full physics dice. But honestly, I’ve done physics dice before and I haven’t done predetermined dice animations before, so this was actually easier for me. Plus I think it adds a certain ‘cool’ factor. Also, a lot of players don’t trust RNG’s but might be happier believing a physics simulation isn’t cheating them.

All that said, some players are impatient and won’t want to sit and watch the dice fall three times a combat, so I’ll probably have an option in the final version to turn them off and just use the RNG anyway.

[salmakesgames]

Fancy dice thingies for the combat mini-game. 

[salmakesgames]

And I’ve got the basic framework for leader abilities that let you change the board.

[salmakesgames]

It’s not hooked up into the rest of the game yet, and needs more UI work (like displaying when you win.) but other than that the science minigame is basically up and functional.

[salmakesgames]

first look at some of the effects for the science minigame.

The gif didn’t come out super awesome, it’s a lot smoother in game.

[salmakesgames]

Spent yesterday working on some lightning visuals for a science minigame I came up with. Not sure if I like the jagged version or the more smooth one.

[salmakesgames]

Nothing really visual to show off, spent most of the day gutting some old code to get into a better state for going forward.

Also set up some clamping on the camera, so you can’t scroll off into nowhere and the map is always on screen.

[salmakesgames]

So I took a break for a few days to play the Blood Bowl 2 beta, and also because my previously mentioned border fix actually didn’t work in one specific layout. Mainly, when the two borders are connected by exactly one hex, like above. I needed a break to think about how to go about fixing it.

Fortunately, as you can probably tell from the above picture, I managed to fix it today. ^^

[salmakesgames]

So yesterday I was working on getting the settling of outposts working, which I almost finished, but then I discovered my border drawing code screwed up miserably if you put down an outpost so that the borders merged in certain non-convex ways. Like so:

So the rest of yesterday and today were spent fixing that. Fortunately, it is now fixed. And turned out to be simpler than I’d expected. To anyone else who runs into this issue, Do Not try to sort the points, sorting concave points is super harder than what you need to do, lol.

[salmakesgames]

Got it to where you can claim things inside your territory and abandon stuff you’ve claimed, also disbanding units. Too tired to take screens right now, plus the UI still isn’t quite done.

[salmakesgames]

Last couple days were spent mostly on less visual things, getting some of the underlying systems ready for work.

Today however I got a border line drawing. It’s a little wonky looking along the vertical map edge, but it’s great inside the map. :) I think that’s kind of a natural consequence of a hex grid on a rectangular map.

I wanted it to be more straight lines (like AoW III or GalCiv III) as opposed to following the hex edges more closely (more like Civ V), largely because the later would look a lot better with them rounded which would also be harder to accomplish. Also I like seeing the territory of one city drawn as a big hex, since conceptually that’s sort of what it is.