September has just about come and gone here. I’ve been working on a variety of things with Verdant Village this month as I’m slowly piecing the game back together. I feel like a lot of the framework is in place at this point. There’s still a lot missing, but I think I’m making good progress. Once the framework is done its on to more of the details and little things. I generally find that those little details are usually easier and quicker to add because they are comparably small. A good example is adding perks and skill levels is important, but in terms of system design it’s a minor detail when compared to something like farming.
As for what I actually did, it was a fair amount of jumping around. First, I finished up the shop UI as it wasn’t fully in place. I added buyback for shops, which I believe was mentioned in the last post. Multi item buying has also been added in a more visible way than what is in the current game. Portrait animation and character dialogue was added to the shop. Basically, the character reacts when you buy and sell things. They have a few lines, and their portrait animates.
One of the larger systems that needed to be designed was a particle system. There aren’t a ton of particles in this game but there might be more in this version, time will tell. Regardless I created a whole framework to create said particles and deal with them accordingly as using them incorrectly can cause memory leaks and such.
The next thing I took on was another large-scale system, lighting. The game has had a clock running and simulated days, months, years, etc for a long time now, but there was no lighting to show time moving. So, I made up the day/night lighting system and got it working, along with allowances for things like light from your character, braziers, lanterns, etc. Currently it is getting very dark at night, much more than in the current version. I’ll have to do some testing to see if I want to keep that, but as it stands nighttime might look a fair bit different.
After that I had to make another modular system for passive item functionality. Its another system that is used sparingly but there are a few items that function passively from your hotbar. The most obvious examples are any item you can place in the world and the carpenter’s mallet. When you have a placeable item selected you’ll get an outline of the item that follows your cursor so you can place it. The carpenter’s mallet lets you hover an item with the mouse to select it and remove it. These sorts of interactions happen passively as long as you are hovering the item. So, a system has been developed to arrange all of that.
Along with passive functionality I’ve created the framework for placing objects in the world. So, you can place things down at this point. The only item like this in the game currently is the chest. The reason it’s the only item is because once I made it I created the entire chest UI. Which then involved rescoping inventory interactions to work in a setting where you are looking at an open chest. These interactions with the chest are all done at this point.
This month was admittedly a little slow. My pace varies a bit depending on what I am tackling. For this month figuring out particles was part of that. The other major hinderance however was an internal engine change. For those that don’t know I’m using Game Maker for the remake. I almost picked Unity, given recent news I guess I lucked out there.
In any case, Game Maker, like every engine, has a lot of built in variables and functions to make development easier. Specifically, they have a variable called “room” which would give you the index of the room the player was currently in. I was using this variable as basically a key to allow the player to move between rooms. Sometime this month, I forget when, they updated the engine and changed the value that this variable returned to something very different. So, a chunk of my time was spent rewriting the room transition code to use data that doesn’t rely on that room variable. TL; DR, Game Maker made a change, I had to pivot on a fairly large system which took up some time.
I think that’s it for this month. Nothing terribly exciting but some decent progress nonetheless. I’ll be back to report at the end of October as usual. Hope you all enjoy spooky season, its arguably my favorite time of year.