Welcome, welcome, welcome back. Another month gone by which means yet another exciting dev log – let’s get right into it.
Editor, Please
As things stand, this whole ‘construct editor’ is proving to be quite an unruly beast to tame, as I’m still waist deep in back-end scripting with seemingly no end in sight. Placement validation, adjacency checks, cell mapping, she’s a bit of a doozy that’s for sure. But, the good news, is that it is still moving along – and hopefully, within the next month or so, I might be coming out the tail end. For now though, I have some new assets to show off, which come in the form of Structural Features;
And yes – these are features that are indeed structural in nature. Ladders, stairs, windows, catwalks, hatches, all the good stuff. This first set contains metal variants, but as the game progresses I’ll be adding a lot more variants to the roster (especially for surface/city locations). The features themselves use unity prefabs, but are made-up of sprites/JSONs just like any other in-game item, and so full mod support will also be available for each kind (within the defined prefab types). These features are now fully integrated into the editor and, bar a few placement errors and validation logic fixes, they’re pretty much ready to go.
Alongside structural features, I’ve also done a full re-design on the editor layout – and the whole game’s UI too, in fact – and I’ll showcase that in this following section.
UI Stuffs
One major point of contention throughout development has been the game’s UI style. As you may have seen in earlier logs, I’d originally gone for a graphic-heavy, stylised approach, with hand-drawn buttons, panels, and interactive elements for every single screen. It looked great and had a certain charm to it, but it was very much at odds with the game’s highly moddable nature.
Hand-drawn UI sprites are one thing in isolation. Getting them to play nicely with dynamic UI, mod extensions, and new mod panels is a whole other matter entirely. On top of that, hand-drawing every piece of UI is an enormous amount of work to add to an already-massive pile – so yeah, perhaps not the best direction…
So, that all being said, I’ve decided to pivot towards a more simple but cleaner-looking UI, which you’ll see below:
Yes, that’s right, I also updated the website with matching UI as well.
Personally, I actually really like this change. It does lose a bit of its charm, sure, but I think that the end result is just far cleaner and far easier on the eyes. Most importantly, the new UI is now far more extendable by mods, which aligns with the overall vision for the game far better.
I’ve also got some screenshots to showcase this new UI style in the construct editor, which, aside from the visual redesign, has also received a pretty significant layout change.
The reason for this layout change was pretty much just to try de-clutter everything. I think it’s been pretty effective in that regard, with far more ‘usable’ space now available, but it does still need work. In fact, I’m actually now in the process of merging both catalogues (edit compartment + add structural feature) into one unified catalogue, wherein you will no longer need to ‘select’ a compartment to edit it, and instead just pick a category, click a thumbnail, then use the tile ghost (at the cursor) to click and place/apply that tile to whatever compartment you are hovering over. It’s still a work in progress, but I’ll be able to show more in the next log.
I will say, designing a build-mode editor is hard work lol. You really don’t realise just how many QoL features you take for granted in most games, until you actually try design a similar system yourself. I fully expect this editor to undergo many more redesigns throughout the course of its creation, and I’ll be sure to document them all here (well, the interesting parts at least).
Screens for Which Loading Occurs
Alrighty, the final (and coolest) update I have for you today is the loading screen art. I say coolest because, well, I think it just looks sweet, but I guess *realistically* it’s probably the least important thing on the roster right now (lol). Anywho, I’ll drop a little in-progress GIF to show you what I’m talking about, before adding a few final words after.
(Note: Still a work in progress, but I think the vibe comes across well enough)
So the idea is that this, being one of many random characters, will function similarly to the well-known GTA style of loading screens. Two images, a character plus a background, on separate layers, and with a slight parallax effect in place. The next couple of characters will likely include a sleazy ship-captain counting money, a soldier aiming his gun, a zombie doing zombie things, and a bunch more stuff along those lines. These, of course, will use JSONs like most-everything else and will be entirely moddable – be it the addition of more characters, the removal of characters, or just a complete replacement (for overhauls).
I will address the elephant in the room, in that I realise that ‘loading screen art’ is actually quite low on the totem pole of priorities, especially when there are so many other more important aspects of the game that still need work. Whilst this is very much true, taking a bit of a side tangent on this art – and producing something with real visible results – has been just as much of a mental health thing as it has a work thing. It’s probably no surprise but, spending months upon months working on background/foundational systems is actually super taxing on morale. Due to that fact, I think that the occasional side quest isn’t the worst thing in the world.
So yeah, there we have it – another month of development. Here’s hoping for more exciting stuff in the next one (once this damn editor gets done).
If I’ve come across as somewhat defeated in this log, I’ll admit, it’s ’cause I kinda am lol. Game dev has been pretty rough lately, which ain’t a surprise, since everyone knows solo development is a roller-coaster of a journey. Right now I think I’m just experiencing a low point. Luckily for me though, and I guess for you, I’m in way too deep to give up now – sunk cost fallacy and all – so I just gotta ride out this slump until it passes. Anyway, this is a WordPress post and not a psychiatrist’s speed dial – so I’ll leave it at that.
As always, thanks for tuning in and see ya in the next one!
