Ungods

A game of gods, humans and possibly the odd cow

[ungodsgame]

In progress work

Focus is on:

Code / asset cleanup - lots of try 1, try 2, try 3 etc knocking around - a big clean up is underway.

Completing the terrain system for now with collision detection

Finishing off the new camera controls (the last part is shifting the focal point - that requires terrain collision detection)

Finishing all that off this week will keep me happy.

[ungodsgame]

MoSCoW priorities for a first demo

I've set out the priorities for a first public playable demo of Ungods as a Trello board - the demo will be available to anyone and is intended as a proof of intent / capability for a Kickstarter campaign to fund the rest of the projects development.

The goal is to get as much done as possible for a christmas release of the demo. Since this isn't (yet) my day job, that timescale may slip.

[ungodsgame]

Clouds have started to go in, some of the UI has slimmed down as well. The single camera removes the need for UI bits on the top bar - and also a "far-sight" mode is no longer relevant so the right hand column got narrower.

[ungodsgame]

In progress work on new terrain generation

[ungodsgame]

The Red'Uns and the Blue'Uns have a problem...

They both believe in the god Un (that's yours truly) but the Red'Uns are convinced your favourite colour is red, whilst the Blue'Uns would have us believe that you'd much rather go with a soothing blue.

This ideological schism has driven them to war - and whilst you revel in the glory of their mutual destruction, it would be best if neither side gained too much of an advantage. You wouldn't want any genocide now. Would you?

So goes the new basic plot line for Ungods. Whilst fleshing out some more manipulations recently it became apparent that any sufficiently powerful god requires artificial game limits to prevent them from massacring the enemy. So why not make the game about trying not to massacre (too much) - but rather keep two opposing sets of believers in balance? I'll need to develop a feedback mechanism that rewards retaining balance to go along with it.

[ungodsgame]

Video of manipulating cows to clone them, warp them and kill them

[ungodsgame]

Video of manipulating giant redwoods to make them grow and die

[ungodsgame]

And now a forest of them...

[ungodsgame]

We have trees! 

[ungodsgame]

And that's the camera controls tweaked - onto structuring the sound effects for UI interactions.

[ungodsgame]

The time controls have been condensed into the top bar UI now. Just some tweaks to go on the camera controls and I can put the top bar UI to bed for now.

[ungodsgame]

Group selection / count have a new home in the tabs. There's also a new collapsible top bar UI containing the MP3 player, time and camera controls (in all modes) with more settings and controls available in the different sizes that's starting to take shape.

[ungodsgame]

Nearly finished with the scripting - for now

From my original list of work for this holiday the first block was all scripting / automation related, the following have now been done:

New tabbed UI for script components / console

UI components for scripts

GET command

INVOKE command

The SET command needs looking, as does a mechanism to supply values back into scripts. I think I'll park these for a bit - need to do something a little less meta.

[ungodsgame]

The UI for scripts is built - allows the loading / unload of scripts as well as interaction with UI bits exposed by the script - the screenshot shows the following bits from a new sayhello script 

// This will expose the value of the property as a label with the prefix "# Said Hello" formatted as #,##0 [UILabel("# Said Hello", "#,##0", DisplayOrder = 0, ElementSize = UIElementSize.Large)] public int SaidHelloToCount { get { return _saidHelloTo.Count(); } } // This will expose the invocation of the method via a UI button with the label "Say Hello Again" [UIButton("Say Hello Again", DisplayOrder = 1, ElementSize = UIElementSize.Large)] // This will expose the method via the command - invoke Scripts.SayHello.Again [InvokableMethod("Again", "Says hello again to all the greeted things")] public void SayHelloAgainCommand() { // call our private method that's going to do the work SayHelloAgain(); }

As well as the UI bits, you can invoke methods exposed from scripts with the invoke command:

invoke Scripts.SayHello.Again

[ungodsgame]

The command console rendering inside the tab control - three different sizes. There's no console output in minimal, just the textbox input.

[ungodsgame]

3-size command console is done for now - the screen shot shows normal mode - there's also full screen and minimal. This is going to change slightly to become a tabbed interface with the console as one of the tabs.

[ungodsgame]

Time off work == Time to build

With a week off work, what better things could I have planned than to simply plough through as much Ungods work as possible? I've got the following major bits planned:

New tabbed UI for script components / console

UI components for scripts

SET command

GET command

INVOKE command

Behavior toggling

Bring in MP3 player / audio framework from another project

Try and animate cows walking

Trees / the concept of shelter

Tiredness

Mating

Defacting

Plant reproduction

Sheep

Fear responses

Carnivore food seeking behaviour

Wolves!

A page detailing the scripting environment

A page with the list o' commands

I've already knocked off a few things :

Multi-size command console (a few rough edges - but 99% there)

Rewritten data component column access using expressions rather than reflection, now works against properties as well - this took way longer than it should - but it was a learning experience with dynamic expressions.

Cache compiled UQL expressions