June 2021 Development Update

June was a rough month in general for our team in terms of focusing energy and time to deadland, so our update this month is going to be a little sparse (and late, sorry :/). That said, I won't leave you empty handed.

Character Profiles Coming Next Month, Actually

Like I said, we got pretty off-track with our work on deadland in June, so the character profiles I mentioned in the last devlog didn't end up getting posted (or put together at all). It's also been a hot second since I did any pixel art streams, so if you've been watching our Twitter account for these updates, don't worry, you didn't miss them. We just had other priorities pop up in June, more than we were expecting, so our Content Output slowed for a bit. I'm going to try to plan ahead a little better for July so we can still put stuff out even if we end up getting waylaid by real-life stuff again.

How's That Relationship System Coming Along?

So, it turns out tracking NPC relationships is a little more programmatically involved than I initially thought, and while I've gotten started on implementing a relationship system, just only barely. I decided to do the parts that I'm confident in doing and hold off on all the hard stuff until later, because I am a coward. As a result, the current state of the relationship system is about, mmmmm... 5% functional. Not quite as far along as I was hoping to get this month, but technically I did work on it. What I didn't work on was any of the actual writing for these characters to implement once the relationship system is functioning. Whoops.

But I Did Work on the Journal System, Too

Do you ever wish in Stardew Valley that you could just make in-game notes to yourself about everyone's favorite stuff so you don't keep having to open the Fandom wiki on your phone while you play? Well, I do, so I'm adding a journal system to the game.

So far, the journal system is almost entirely functional except the part where you can actually save the things you write. I know that seems like maybe at  least the second-most important factor in a journal system, but I've already got some of the more time-consuming elements of the system done (adding scroll view in Unity is an absolute pain), so I should actually be able to fully finish it this month, assuming I don't hop back to working on one of the other half-finished game systems in our current build.

Interiors

I've also been working on implementing interiors, which took way longer than it should have because I fully forgot that Collision and Collision2D are, indeed, separate things in C#. But, as it currently stands, we now have code to get your player character from the inside of a building to back outside (and by "back outside", I mean the bootup point in the test scene). We also have a prototype interior for the default homestead building.

Any Other Programming Stuff?

Aside from tweaking the UI layout to better adjust to different screen resolutions and redoing the (still incomplete) tooltip system, no, not really. But those two things also took me forever, so I figured it was worth mentioning.

Art Stuff

Speaking of things that took me forever, I've expanded the default color palette for the game.

This is the color palette used for all the town elements, UI, buildings, and items in the game. Currently, character sprites are not constrained to this palette, but I'm hoping that now that I've expanded it, I can take some time to update character sprites to match these set colors for a more uniform look while still appearing distinct from each other and their environments. Some of the building prototypes that I've already done have also been updated with this new color palette, although the changes are minor--mostly, I just really needed a few more shades of brown on a lot of them. I'll also be expanding the color palettes for the new game areas (mentioned in the previous post) this month.

That's Pretty Much It For Now

Other than that, I've been chipping away at some pixel art--NPC sprites, UI elements, and buildings, mostly--and Eli has been hard at work with more character portraits.

Planned For July

I intend to power through at least one of the game systems that I currently have sitting half-finished in Unity. Which one, exactly, remains to be seen, but I've reached the point with all of them that I know the only way forward is to just power on through. Meanwhile, I will again plant my flag in the claim to try to do some writing for NPC dialogue, so we'll see if I can actually stick to it this month. Otherwise, I'll keep up with the pixel art and other little bits and bobs in the program.