#undervillage

[undervillage]

Hey everyone, underVillage is going through some cosmetic changes, which I’ll be ready to share sometime soon.

In the meantime, since I know you’re hungry for some art(!), please enjoy some free gamedev assets you can use to spruce up your own projects: https://www.patreon.com/matthewjwills?ty=h Thanks for your support! Matt

[undervillage]

Hi Jason here.

Above is the startup screen for the WebGL based Character Preview we’re working on.  I’m using a particle effect with one of Matt’s hand drawn flame animations to create the flame.  Do you like it?

[undervillage]

Teaser

Hi, Jason here.  We’ve been working hard on making a WebGL build that we hope to release to the public soon.  This will let you randomly generate your own underLing , recolour it, take selfies and post them to Facebook. This will be a bit of a teaser until the full game is complete.

We have a few more things to do to make it nicer looking, including some backgrounds you can select and a few more icons instead of our placeholders but it’s nearly there. You can see I also have Facebook integration working with my development account.   

You may notice the shadows on the Facebook snapshots.  We’ve encountered a performance issue on some systems, so have had to turn shadows off. Hopefully I can resolve the performance issue to get the shadows back, since I really like the shadows on the photos.

Once we can host it at a better location and get Facebook to review the app, then we will release to the masses.  There is no timeframe for the release yet, but we’re trying to have it as soon as possible.

[undervillage]

Asset test scene

It's working!  My asset test scene is now fully functional.  The character above was created using the test scene.  Now Matt can test out all of the assets on an in-game character, selecting the body part to change the asset, colour, sheet name, etc. 

In addition to the tester scene, I have load and save of characters working as well! I had a very productive weekend, one more item completed and closer to an alpha build!

Note: This test scene is not intended to be in the final game, but I thought it worthwhile to show some more tangible progress toward being able to test out all of our assets.

[undervillage]

Asset debugging

Hi,

Jason here.  I realised late last week that I didn’t do my regular Tuesday update, and by the time I got the time to actually consider doing an update it was well into the weekend.  

I’ve been working on a lot of things lately, prepping for alpha but also getting some bugs fixed and tools for Matt to be able to test all of our sprites. The screenshot above is an example debug scene that I’m working on.  There are buttons so we can select and cycle through all of the body part assets, and eventually display the name of the sprite that was last changed.  I’m not a UI designer, so this is meant to be more functional rather than aesthetically pleasant.    

These debug buttons are not expected to be in the final game at this time, I just wanted to share how we’re dealing with testing all of the character assets Matt has drawn.

To get the character debug working more efficiently, and more importantly to be able to load/save characters, I’ve changed up the character generation method internally.  The body parts still manage their sprites, but a character generator is now employed to do the randomisation and asset selection from the asset bundles.  This means I will soon be able to load/save characters in the game, another one of my alpha build goals is close to fruition!

The character actually does move on the screen, so we can see animations and such.  Using this I was able to sort out some somewhat inconsistent sprite layering behaviour and a few other niggly bugs.  I have also experimented with the movement of the character, adding a bit more weight and momentum to the movement.  I think it feels a bit better now, but will have to test it out in a game scene to verify.

One final thing you’ll see is a link to a share button.  We have plans for some social media integration, being able to capture and share screenshots of your characters.  

[undervillage]

Quick post

Just a quick update on this past week and half

* Tidy up of Stats and Skills system after more consideration of last weeks post. Stats work great, skills are stubbed out as I have nothing yet to use the skills on.  I’ve done a fair amount of testing, but need to look at some concurrency tests to make sure multiple events/messages received/sent simultaneously are handled properly. 

* Arm animation *finally* changed to something a lot less bad than what I had. This was actually corrected to start working on a teaser/trailer for the game. Matt has written a script for it, just a matter of getting it all together.  This’ll take time as some of the stuff he wants requires me to have more of the alpha features completed.

* Importing, as I type this, an AI package that I want to try to use for the NPC behaviours.  If I can link this up and get it working over the weekend, I’ll have about half of the alpha build target features I want in place.  

Until next week, cheers!

[undervillage]

Good progress

Hi all,

Just a quick update on some progress from this week.  First up is a screenshot below of the prototype walls dreamingofserenity did for us.  I’ve reapplied the old UV to this model, so it’s far from ideal right now. At some point in the future we will re-evaluate whether we apply a better hand drawn UV or use a solid colour, either with a bump map as well.  For alpha this will suffice though.

On the code side, I’ve put together a functional stat/skill system for our first alpha build.  I set out from the start to build something that could hopefully be easily extensible and reusable on other games, and I think I’ve achieved that (mostly).

I have a “stat manager” class (publisher) that acts as the interface between the stats and the rest of the game components (subscribers). From there I can instantiate stats/skills programmatically with a few lines of code for each.  Perhaps down the road I’ll change the instantiation to be more configuration file driven, that will be ideal for maximum re-usability.

I’m using Unity Events for intra-system messaging at the moment, so I expose a method for other systems to send messages to the stat system, and of course expect the other systems to expose a similar interface to receive any response message.   Internally, between the stat manager and stats I’m using c# delegates & events.  I may have over-engineered this part of the solution, but it will be easy to unwind if I find I don’t need the flexibility of delegates.

The messages could be queries for current stat/skill levels, or in the case of skills, a request to “use” a skill.  Thus, I have the flexibility to have the subscriber to determine how it interprets/uses the stat/skill data or have the skill/stat do it itself. The manager takes no part in the stat calculations, it simply handles the stats and the messages to and from them.

After talking to a co-worker, I’m probably now going to use more of the subscriber determines “use” model, expecting that the subscribers will cache the stat values they need and then operate on those cached values to determine end result and report back whatever the stat system needs to keep stats up to date or level up. This will keep intra-system messages down to effectively updates when stats/skill levels change or need to be updated. (thanks Felix!)

I have the stat system also linked up to the character generation system, allowing us to have the assets affect the character stats.  The beauty of this that it took less than an hour to implement and test, so I’m happy with that result.  As an example of assets affecting character stats, different species mouth parts may affect a food consumption stat (e.g. characters with human mouths eat more than bug mouths).  

Whatever we do with body parts and stats, it will take careful balancing, as conceivably the procedural generation of characters could end up with some very unbalanced, stat-wise, characters.  Whether we do this or not is still up for discussion, or even better, feedback from our readers! (*hint hint*).

That’s it for today.  Again if you like what we’re doing, please hit the Like button and if you’re not following us yet, please hit the follow button too!  We appreciate the support and feedback.  

[undervillage]

Big update

It’s been a long month here, but I think I now have some news that I’m (Jason) happy to report.  In short,  it’s gamedev time!

First is the above concept wall tile that dreamingofserenity did for us.  I’ve not put it in game yet, but I’m definitely happy to see something better than my boring cubes.  It’s designed to be tilable so it should do well for caverns.  Still have some ideas we’re exploring but hopefully will get this into the game with some sort of UV soon.

Second is that I now have a big stack of paper work that covers the following:

* A pretty complete backstory, describing character origin and setup * All game mechanics to reasonably good detail, including first time play through and subsequent play through mechanics, resource management/storage, house building and crafting, farming/hunting, combat, skill/stat leveling, mini-games, breeding, status effects and NPC behaviours * Stats and skills system, including leveling and aforementioned status effects, with the possibility of the body part species type having an effect on character skills. * Classes and key methods for getting it all to work together * Events and Messaging for game play events and triggers.  

Most importantly from all that paper is I’ve identified what will be in our first alpha build that I want to target to have completed within the next month or so.  This will include the following

* 1-2 player directed autonomous NPC behaviours that exhibit key capabilities of NPCs to interact with the environment (e.g. tend the fire, collect wood) * 1-2 character stats (e.g. Health and Food Consumption rate)  * 1-2 skills (e.g Melee and Resource gathering) and leveling * 1-2 spawnable items (e.g. monster, resource or new quest) * Build 1 structure at a player chosen location (e.g level the terrain, build location to store fuel for the fire or a house) * Collect/drop/deposit/use resources * Melee combat * Save/Load of Player and Resource storage states 

I already have a start on several of these like character stats, building, collect/drop resources and melee combat from a previous attempt.  I think I can re-use most of that code.  So the new stuff will be the behaviours, skills and leveling, spawnable items, some aspects of structure building and load/save.

I will focus on delivering these core examples in a way that will let me expand/modify all of them to ultimately deliver the final game.  There will be heaps to do like procedural world gen, animations, rest of the behaviours, stats, skills, structure crafting and such.  Plus we’ll have all of the extra touches like dealing with the occluding walls in the way we really want them to work, lighting and special effects, mini-games, etc.