DevLog In Retrospect Part 3
And the final devlog in retrospect in this series! Technically I haven’t caught up with myself yet (this devlog was written in September of last year and there’s more where that came from). BUT I figured this would be a nice end to the series, as this was the last time I fiddled around with a story editor that didn’t make it into the project for realsies. I really hope I don’t have to eat those words later on...
9/20/2020
This weekend I started by trying to integrate AdventureCreator into my project. I didn’t really like it, had a slow time picking things up, it felt rigid and brittle and a lot of little components I could make on my own. So I decided (hopefully the last time to make this decision?) that I’d make my own systems for navigation, inventory, stats, mood, text, etc. I’d already made a lot of these anyway. Conversation trees are still a big fear for me, but I’m back on the side of parsing a twine html file to create Unity-friendly conversation trees [note from future Katie: I actually landed on Yarn Spinner soon after this instead].
I added the biped version of Ali, as well as the backgrounds and props for hallway, bathroom and kitchen (probably not all but a lot). I revisited the navigation controls. Previously Ali could only move on a 1D axis: left and right, but I wanted him to be able to move forward and backward too. I took a quick detour into unity’s Nav Mesh land, but that requires faking a 2D mesh with 3D components and rotating everything 90 degrees…. Decided it wasn’t worth it.
Now when you click on the floor and let go while still on the floor, Ali will move to that location. If you drag your mouse outside the “floor” object, Ali will move to the spot your cursor left the floor collider. Note: As it stands right now, floor is buggy. You can see in Apartment.unity the bedroom has 3 floor panels. You can click, drag, see the pointer, and move Ali around. But ultimately I’d want there to only be 1 floor panel per room. At the moment my attempts to remove 2 of the floors and/or resize them result in non-functional floor. I’m wondering if it’s the mask or Sorting Layer???
I added in Waypoints and Hotspots this time around. Waypoints are like UCInteractables, but instead of bringing up text they fade out the scene, move Ali to a hotspot, and then fade back in. Hotspots are like starting positions for Ali – it’s where he enters rooms. They also include a direction for which way he points when he is transported to that hotspot. This allows the player to move from room to room. I still need to implement some sort of Follow Camera.
A note on scene architecture: a unity scene should contain one chunk of the game. For instance, the scene I’ve been working in is the Apartment, and the bedroom, bathroom, hallway, kitchen and livingroom are all included. Ali jumps from room to room using the UCSceneManager’s ChangeToRoom command.
Finally, I committed to github and pushed this doc to SugarSync.
Summary of DevLogs && Seeking Out the Holy Grail of Story Creation Tools
While researching story creation tools I came across a few nuggets of information. One: most large studios have their own narrative builder tools that they built/own in-house. Two: smaller game devs often use platforms like Ren’py, Game Maker Studio or RPG Maker, which feel limiting in terms of what the programmer can and can’t do. Three: outside of these sources, there are TONS of story editor tools, of varying degrees of writer-friendliness, programmer-friendliness, price and availability. It feels like every time I google anything related to narrative games I get bombarded with 3 or 4 new game creation tools I hadn’t known about prior. This space is inundated, yet no solution feels perfect. Everything has a learning curve, and it’s not until you’re deep into the learning curve that you realize the shortcomings of the tool you’re using. You end up with a lot of false starts, trying to settle into a tool while knowing there are tons more options out there. At one point we were even considering writing our own parsing system from Final Draft to Unity. Needless to say, did not continue on that tread. Our small team consists of a programmer comfortable in Unity and a writer proficient in Twine. We want more control over systems than tools like Adventure Creator or GameMaker allow. We’re also fans of a game called Night in the Woods - built using Yarn Spinner and Unity. So eventually that’s what we settled on. 10 months later, things are going well. The tool-finding process also taught me something about myself. I’ve been in the industry for years and am the lead programmer for Art of Distress. But I still doubt myself every step of the way. I’d make a big decision - let’s use Adventure Creator! - and take two steps in and wonder - Did I make a mistake? Is this wrong? Is there something better? Am I dumb, or a lesser programmer for using this tool instead of something else? I’m still questioning my choices, even now, trying to re-google things I read a year ago and finding yet MORE tools I could’ve chosen. I’d call this impostor syndrome but I’ve been told to stop feeling like an impostor I should stop calling it impostor syndrome. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ What I’ve learned: - Even if you’re afraid that you’re doing the wrong thing, pick a path and stay on it, at least for a while. At some point you have to stop second-guessing yourself and start building. If you run into a problem and need to roll back a decision you made, it’s much better to do that than to keep waffling forever and never getting anything done. TL;DR: don’t be a coward!
