Hi friends, fans and family
These last two weeks have been a bit different since my wife has been away most of the time so I’ve had that my daughter for myself. I’ve still managed to maintain a pretty high tempo but my working hours have differed greatly I have not worked as much in the morning and I have worked a bit more during the night. So what have I been up to this time?
Newsletter
I finally have a newsletter up and running where you can keep updated on everything that I’m doing with the game: http://tinyletter.com/sinistersiamese and it’s the best place to get a summary of these blogposts and find out stuff that I don’t necessarily talk about anywhere else 😉
JSON map import
I finally managed to get JSON working to be able to import maps. It took me a little while to get it working since there were some minor weirdness when using the JSON utility in unity. You need to think a bit about where you place your arrays and how you structure them for unity to actually get it, so it works better if you have a simple structure and if you avoid doing to much nested stuff. Now I have a base to iterate from where I can position the enemies or state that they get a random position and I can also lay out my entire map in JSON. Still have to do some things to control dialogue and other stuff but things will be easy now that I have this in place. My next step with this will be to build some sort of level editor that can actually create the JSON. I might actually write this in swift so I can make an app on my phone or iPad and create maps on the go.
Typewriter effect
So I mentioned that I was going to have dialogue from the game right? In order to get that looking right there are a few things that need to be put in place: a few funny character expressions, nice dialogue and also a typewriter effect that makes each letter or word appear one by one so it looks like the character is talking :D. I made a basic implementation that does this and I’ve also added parameters so I can configure talking speed and put in pauses at the end of a sentences etc.
Particle effects
Man this part was so much fun. I could probably fool around with the particle system for the entirety of the project just to get things looking nice and have cool effects all over the place. It’s really easy to use. You basically just place the particle system somewhere the same way you place a game object and then your fiddle around with parameters. Naturally, the challenge does not lie in messing around with stuff, it’s actually making it look really good and tweaking things takes quite some time and it’s definitely easier if you have some sort of understanding about what it is you’re doing. I managed to put in an effect for when the characters are walking and kicking up dust and I also added an effect for hits. I will definitely put in more 😊.
Prefab refactorization
My project started as an old unity tutorial and now that I’ve learned some stuff I’ve started to realize that the default way of doing some things in unity is not necessarily the best way when it comes to architecture so I’ve been trying to move more and more from the clicky draggy parts in the editor to code that I can easily control and manipulate. One of the things I’m doing is that I’m greatly reducing the amount of prefabs I have because I started with loads of them. Now I am instead using one prefab for units for example and configuring them in code instead which suits me much better. With that said it was not a problem free approach since a lot of things were built upon that foundation and I broke a lot of stuff before I got it to work.
Other
As usual I’ve also killed a lot of bugs and I’ve also been going back-and-forth with my hired illustrator to make sure that the splash screen that we are creating lives up to my vision. Really looking forward to showing you guys that and to revealing the title of the game :D.
Going forward I will be trying to push hard now to actually get a demo working because so far most of the work I’ve been doing has been to lay the foundation on which I can build upon. The base is getting closer and closer to completion so now it’s time for me to actually create content.
See you again in two weeks! // Luis
Sinister Siamese Studios 