I made a promise to myself earlier this year that I would have a demo of this game ready by the end of the year, and by gum I will do it! It's not going to be as easy as I had imagined, but I'm well on my way. I have a plan too, which I will get into in a bit, but first; the state of things since the last post!
Water
There were a few large "unknown unknowns" with this project that I knew I would have to tackle going in. These sorts of problems are the hardest to work on. It can be hard to solve a tightly constrained and defined problem, it is always harder to solve a more open and nebulous problem, and it is downright difficult to solve a problem when you don't even know what the constraints are. I have just now checked off one of these unknown unknowns' issues. This is a huge boon to the project and my own experience and skills going forward. Very exciting! The problem? What to do about water.
So far in my game all the visual element have been hand drawn pixelart sprites. I know how to do these after years of experience. I know what I can achieve, and I can visualise what the end result will probably look like before I start. I knew right from the start that I would have water in my game and for just as long I had a very good understanding of what the water would look like if I hand drew it. Here's an example:
I drew one of these myself, the others are examples from various games
I know I could produce water to around this quality level. But I also knew I wouldn't be able to animate it if I did, and that was the problem. I really wanted animated water so I could have gently flowing streams or quietly lapping waves on a shore. The unknown unknown was shaders. My experience with shaders had up until I started this project been entirely through webgl, for some silly text effects on my website. I didn't (and still don't) know very much about them, but I had the understanding that they were what made water look like water in video games. I felt that there must have been many people before me who had used shaders for water in a 2D game in Unity, so I did some googling. From there I read a bunch of tutorials and downloaded a few open source demos.
And then basically, I just mucked around with these preset demos until I got something I liked. I find that the best way I learn something huge at the start is to do this. Download something already working and tinker with it. I changed variables around, looked deeper into the functions used, and tweaked the existing functions watching the effect this had on my scene live - Unity's ability to hotload is very impressive. Here's a quick montage of images showing my progress:
My initial "mirror" shader
Mirror with some colour
Redid the mirror with a system where only certain objects are reflected
My attempt 1 at a falloff as the water got "deeper"
A much better falloff!
New tiles to transition between water and land a bit more smoothly
I'm very happy with the results so far! I have solved a huge issue that had been plaguing me for some time. Well, "solved". Every solution comes with a slew of new problems and questions of course. At the moment here are the remaining things to investigate and solve with the water:
- How can I do waves and water sparkles/glints? Can I hand draw these or can they only be done through the shader?
- How can I do ripples when characters walk through the water?
- Only sprites can be reflected (not tilemaps). Do I need to replicate certain tiles as sprites? How does Unity's workflow work with sprites instead of tiles?
But! It is still a big achievement, and I'm happy to let the water settle (so to speak) for now, before I tackle the above issues. And what about the other main "unknown unknown" issues left to investigate? Well that leads on pretty well to my next main topic for this post...
The End of Year Demo
The end of year demo will consist of the opening of the game, the opening background interactive cutscenes up until the game proper begins. The player will wander around their home village through a few time skips as they watch their neighbours die or leave as the Union and the Arcadians creep closer and closer.
- Program UI -> A start menu, pause, save / load menu
- Cutscene control / scripting
- Save / load functionality
I know nothing about the UI, but it's the one I'm least worried about. I am 100% confident there will be endless tutorials and resources for UI construction in Unity, so I expect that it take me only a day or two to get something simple working.
The cutscene control and scripting is something I feel will be totally custom to my project. I have the instinct that Unity will not provide anything for this, and it will be totally custom, which means I at least don't have to worry about doing much research or messing around in menus and so on. It will probably just be a few custom C# scripts and shouldn't take more than a few days, though if it gets finicky I could see it taking longer.
The real scary task is the save and load functionality. I felt early on I should have focused on this and tried to have it working from the start, but alas, I never did. I did at least keep the idea that I would be serialising my game in mind as I wrote my data structures. I have a big singleton "state" class that contains just about everything I would ever need to save, so theoretically I will just have to serialise that class to json or xml or some Unity supported format and then handle reloading it in again later. But at the same time, save/load reeks of something there would be a Unity™ way of doing. I am sure there are countless tutorials and resources on this as well so I will do some research, but I am at this point at least leaning towards rolling my own system. Anything could happen once I start on this problem though, so I'm a little worried about it. I can't estimate how long it will take...
After that, I just have to do all the art assets for the intros (a few new characters, buildings in various states of decay, and clutter assets), and the writing. The assets will take the bulk of the time from now until the demo is ready. It takes me about a day to do a set of maybe 5 sprites, and I expect I'll need upwards of 40. The writing shouldn't be too hard, I can write these blogs for example in about an hour. However, it will be my first time using my dialog programming system for real and that will be a stress test. I mean literally, I'll find out if it's too stressful to use and whether I should switch to a different way of handling the dialogue.
Other progress
I finished more of the various Arcadian homestead buildings:
The Temple homestead building
The Lahtinen sauna building
I also started the "ruined" architecture for the unincorporated areas - i.e. the intro area for the demo
Beautiful brown brick blocks. Might make the windows smaller
And the final piece of news I have is that I have made contact with one of the bands I have been pursuing about licensing their music for this game and we've started talking. Very exciting!
Until next blog,
Me
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