Messing with Unity

I took a break from working on the construction game to take a look at the Unity game engine.  I've been working on a control scheme for a 3D platformer game for the last couple of days.  Starting with some random guys physics package which had decent math but wasn't really set up for making an actual game.  I started by ripping up the movement into a state machine which now supports motor and grab functions.  You can operate the arms independently of the feet and utilize it to pick up, push, pull, and move objects around in the world.  Movement and jumping states were constructed so that we can add functionality for things like wall jumping more easily.  The state machines are run by a Controller object and then I wrapped the controller scheme into a Character system that can swap out the controllers at runtime based on other inputs.  This lets you change control schemes on any character depending on collision or game state.  So far it works fairly well, my first game test was using the system to swap control schemes on the player for moving in and out of zones tagged for water.  The results are pretty nice, I am able to craft an entirely separate group of states which control water movement and then immediately swap out of them when you exit the water by any means.

Cooling off in the water.

Dev Diary -- Construction is fun

in-game Toolbars

The main bar (top) in horizontal orientation and
a nested bar below it also in horizontal displaying
file options: new, save, load, exit, and quit, respectively.

Hey guys.  I've got a short update today.  I spent some time implementing a toolbar interface for the in-game HUD.  Toolbars are able to be oriented either horizontally or vertically.  For now toolbars can only contain buttons.  Buttons can be text, image, or both and they can also have a tooltip attached to them.  The toolbars function similar to a menuing system, a button can either be the parent to another toolbar or it can have a function bound to it directly.  This lets us do nested toolbars within toolbars within toolbars, a bit redundant but I'm hopeful it will let us do some neat things later on.

I also spent a considerable amount of time refactoring the game's build tools system into a much cleaner state.  I'm now able to create new or modify existing tools much easier which should speed up their development.  In the past this was a fairly tedious process because the tooling was coupled very tightly with the game class and state manager.  In it's place I've developed a tool template class with appropriate input callbacks which is much easier to use, and in addition also executes much faster and is easier to debug.

I'm bad at this blogging thing

Wow I went a week between blog posts, I'm sorry about that.  Hopefully that will not happen again but, no promises :).  I can promise that I've still been hard at work here on the project.  It's taking a little bit more shape but more importantly so is the codebase.  In the last week I've incorporated a lot of new capability into the code,

Path finding

Hey guys, I'm here with another blog update.  Today I want to show you the progress I've made on the implementation of pathfinding algorithms that the simulated people in the game world will utilize.

If you're familiar with building and sim games you know that a huge part of the gameplay revolves around creating the world for your sims to live inside of.  Obviously a large part of living in a world is knowing how to navigate inside of it.  Pathfinding is the mathematical solution to having our sims be able to navigate through the world you build.  Without it they would run into walls, nobody would ever figure out how to leave their rooms, let alone graduate and this would make the game pretty unfun.

Tile Engine Part Deux

The tile engine will be an integral facet of the project so it's important that I make it as robust as
possible.  In today's update I will show off the progress that has been made to it and the engine itself.  Yesterday I showed off painting tiles with solid colors, today I'm going to show you how I've added sprite sheets (collections of tile images), layering, game saving, and game loading.

A tile engine is born

If you're familiar with a bit of the project I'm working on you'll know that a 2D tile engine is a major part of the game.  A major part of the game will involve creating building foundations, the floor plans of the interiors, and placing objects on top of those floor plans.  To make doing so fun we're going to need a strong suite of tools available to the user to manipulate the world with.

Since my last update I've begun to construct the tile engine and tile objects for the game and the beginning of the tool suite that will be available for building in game play.  Let's take a look at the visible progress made so far: