May 2021 Development Update

We've been hard at work this month with a number of things in deadland. Here's a look at what we've been doing.

Feet!

One of my favorite things to do as a creator is to take something foundational and change it, so that I have to tweak everything that's already been built on that foundation. It's a super great habit of mine. Anyway, I changed our character sprites to give them smaller feet.

The goal of this change was to transform our pixelated friends from Kingdom Hearts-style abominations to visually-cleaner sprites whose appendages don't obscure the general sense of movement in their basic animations. Plus, since this is an angled top-down view, having feet (the body part furthest from the camera) being smaller just makes sense, like, geometrically.

Revamping Tile Sets

The tile sets I've been using turned out to have some missing pieces to them (I created them, so entirely my fault), and I took the opportunity to fully redo them, adding the missing pieces and cleaning up their geometry in general to work better in Unity. This also allowed me to make some water tiles that actually, you know, fit together at all. And in addition to that...

New Game Areas

I've started creating ground tiles for environments other than the central town area where the city-building of the game will take place. Currently, we're planning on eventually adding the following extra areas to the game--a cave system, a crystal forest, a marsh, and an abandoned mansion. These areas are still in early concept mode, but the plan is to have them act as regions to gather materials and find bits and pieces about the game's lore. At the moment, in addition to the tile sets that will be used for these environments, we so far only have a couple of area-specific assets (mostly trees) created. Once we've solidified more of the main gameplay, we'll focus more on developing these areas.

Gameplay Development Progress

Oh, speaking of gameplay. We're currently still working on programming the crafting and building systems. It is... not going well. But it is going!

Since we're working from scratch, the current systems we have are a mishmash of tutorials from varied sources that all instruct on designing crafting/building systems that are similar to what we want, but not quite exactly what we want. The result is some Frankenstein code that has undergone numerous tweaks and at the end is still only doing about half of what we need it to do. But! That means both the crafting and building systems are about halfway complete. Basically,  in their current state, you can "craft" and "build" stuff from the appropriate menus by pressing a button and causing the item/building you want to appear in-game. What's missing is the code's ability to check that you have the required materials to actually craft/build these things. Additionally, there are some collision-detection issues with the building system, glitches with the tooltip in the building menu, and a glitch in both systems that causes item/building selection to always instantiate the previous item/building option you clicked on. Example: if you click on the axe recipe in the crafting menu, it crafts the default crafting item (the hammer), and if you click on the axe recipe again, then it crafts the axe. But if you then click on the hammer recipe, it crafts another axe :/ So, we're working on fixing whatever is going on there.

More Character Portraits

Eli's been hard at work putting together more character portraits. Starting next month, I'm going to start posting character profiles to introduce everyone to the residents of deadland, so I'll hold off posting new portraits here, although you might be able to catch a sneak-peek on our TikTok.

Also, We're on TikTok Now

You can find that here.

Planned for June

Unfortunately, since I'm getting really stuck with the crafting and building systems at this point, while I'll continue to work on them where I can, I'll likely shift my focus to a new gameplay system for June: the relationship and re-souling systems! I am very excited to dig deeper into this, since it means I get to play around more with the characters of deadland, and character narratives are my bread and butter. Less my bread and butter is programming (see above), but I am starting to feel more confident with Unity and C#, so I'm going into this stage of development feeling good and having some solid ideas to start with. However, these systems--re-souling especially--will be some of the most complicated in the game, so I imagine I'll hit a number of bumps along the way as I have with the crafting and building systems. But we'll see what I'm able to put together next month!