Bad Guy has a Flag with an emblem #gamedev

I have been busy getting the Main Story quest line implemented in the
game. I have to say it is very exciting as now I am getting down to the
last few of the quests for this. I am being delayed a little bit as I
implement the actual happenings when you get so far through the quest,
such as areas opening up and special animations required etc.

I have also been busy as has Leilani getting some more graphics in the
game, such as NPC portraits and such. They look real nice in my opinion.
Still more to go in, such as the arcade cabinets, which I chopped up
already and have 2 in the game.. that leaves only 7 more to make haha!

I am now close to creating the final scene of the game... the one where
the bad guy resides. Here is his banner that Leilani designed for him.

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Along with all this are the many bug fixes along the way, and a few
minor redesigns of various bits that make the game look better and play
better. While doing all this my kitchen is coming along well in the
house, though slowly as always haha.

Laters
Da Voodoochief

Main Story Line is Written #gamedev

Yes it is true, we finally have our Main Story line written. We have had it laid out/designed for a while, and lots of work has been done around this main story line. But we never quite had it done, and it is rather important!

Now tis story Arc is finished with and we are just tidying up some of the language we can get that flow into the game. There are a number of events in the game that rely on you the player being at certain points along the main story arc. Now I can hook them all up.

One of the funniest items that relies on this story arc is the TOWERR, which is a lovely tower that appears at some point along the story. Though it appears with NO door. How odd.. and later the door should appear. However I have not created the door yet for this tower. Do when I was doing some testing I couldn't figure out how to get into the tower scene I had created several weeks before (when creating scenes I simply use a cheat shortcut).  It took Leilani explaining to me why I could not get into the tower!  I will be glad to hook that up.

With this development it will mean that we can finally head to the end of Phase 2 of the game into Phase 3... which is the final phase of this game. It is like the end is near... or at least approaching.

Have a good one,
Da Voodoochief

p.s. Not posted lately as I was having technical issues with my account. All sorted now I reckon.

Got the Font

It has been a busy week once more, adding more quests into the game, fixing bugs and generally tidying up all sorts of things. along with that Leilani provided some more graphics so I managed to get those in as well. Game looks all the better for them.

So back to the Font. Well one of the first fonts we looked at a couple of weeks ago was called Minya. Both me and Leilani loved the way it looked and felt it suited the game 100%. So then I read the license file that came with it and see I cannot use the font embedded in my App/Game. Dang, well all I need surely is to buy the Font. Well then I looked all over and selected a few font buying sites and got confused about which license I needed and got frustrated.

As it wasn't a totally free font, we thought at this point to simply find another font that would work for us instead. I have to say here that I must have searched through 400 fonts. I downloaded about 30 and put most of them into the game for a test. In fact below is the Minya Font.

 Next up was a Font I really liked called Gabriella, but it wasn't right for the main bodies of text.

 Then Admina, this one was simply too busy for the game, it is supposed to be a relaxed experience.

Smythe looked great when I downloaded it, but once in the game I hated the way it looked, and yes, perhaps I could have made it larger, but I do not think that would have helped to be honest.

So after all that I decided to do what it said on the Minya page of 1001font.com, that was to contact the creator if I had any questions. Yes, I did! Well wouldn't you know it.. on his contact page he had some questions answered and he answered one about App embedding licenses and gave several links to purchase this license. So I chose the first one (Fontspring.com) and on that page I could buy the App license for 12 dollars and the Web embedding license for only 3 dollars as it was on offer.

So for 15 dollars I got the exact font I wanted, our favorite font. All that running around , hours on top of hours trying various fonts and in the end I went with just about the first one I saw... Life can be funny like that I guess.

G'night
Da Voodoochief

Fonts Required

I didn't manage to get anything done on the game this weekend, though my Friday meeting with Leilani was as good and productive as always.

Still this weekend was full of Football (American) and Supercross and lots of Tennis, mostly by my wife, but also by me. Then there was a nice 50th celebration with my friend Chris. Great weekend, it went in a flash haha!

So, to the title. Fonts... One of the items on our list and has been an item for a long time is the fact we need to obtain final fonts for the game. We decided we only need two fonts, a Title/Header font and also a main body text font. Different requirements, but at least we only need two and not three. Now in the past I have been criticized that I had too many fonts on a screen (it was 3), and also that the fonts did not compliment each other. So this time we are both going to have to agree with the choices, and also we need to make them both compliment the actual game and therefore each other.

The thing about Fonts I do not like is the licensing for them, it can get me quite confused. As that is a factor I will probably only go with completely free font licenses, even if I favor another font. Having said that I have a font I like for the Body text and it has a license that is restricted for App embedding. As I cannot understand the restrictions or where/how to buy it for my needs I will likely email the creator and see what the deal is. Some of these fonts get really expensive for Apps, even if they are a 10th of the cost for Web pages and more.

This is the week we will decide on them, one way or another. So in a future post I should be able to post some samples or comparisons of ones we looked at and why we made decisions we did.

On a last note for tonight I will mention that the other day I realized that my Blog posts are no longer going to my Facebook page or my Twitter account which means I have very few views each week. It was quite confusing for a while there till I realized. So I will have to fix that soon.. yet another job.

G'night
Rob

Inventory design and a Cave painting

In the image above you can see a section of the Cave. On the left side is the Ore that you come here, primarily to mine. I have about finished the whole Cave1 system now and am working on refining the environment and adding cool touches where I see them needed. I think it is quite atmospheric, though I have still to find the right music for this scene.


When playing the game itself lately I have become a little displeased with the Inventory system that you use. It isn't really bad, but it has a few shortcomings and so in a recent design discussion with Leilani we came up with several touches that should improve it's usability. For example... where the cursor is when you bring up the inventory, is exactly where you left it, no more resetting to the top corner. Also the cursor now wraps on the horizontal, meaning you can get to the furthest item real fast! Along with this was the fact we have added in sooooo many more items for you to carry than the original design called for, so we wanted to address that too.

We decided we needed to show more inventory items at a time.....

We were only displaying 5 items on the horizontal lines, and so adding more items should be easy right? In the above image you can see that I went all out and made it 9 in the line. However we really felt this was a bit crowded. I also wonder how people might fair on the touch screen tablets. So 9 was too many... ok then....

So then we tried 8, which was still too crowded. finally I ended up on 7 and felt OK about it. Leilani confirmed and so I made it so in the code. Now I feel that using the inventory is not bad, not bad at all. Still the best feature was adding in the fact that the cursor did not reset when the inventory was displayed.

The reason the cursor was reset is due to the fact that the Traders also used your inventory display and code. Well as it happens I do not think this inventory display really suits the Traders. So after a brief discussion and design session we came up with a totally new layout for Traders to display their wares. I have just started on it and will report on that in a future post :)

Lastly I want to mention that Unity really lets me down badly when using large Enums in the Editor. they display in a linear fashion and it is very cumbersome. So a few days ago I spent 5 bucks on an editor asset that fixes this issue by adding a search box and a vertical scroll bar. I think this is going to be 5 bucks well spent. Otter Menus.

Laters
Da Voodoochief

New Rock Smashin Gif

That is my newest Gif. I am so pleased with myself for remembering to create one to show ya what I have been very recently working on.

This animation shows me smashing a rock to get some stone pieces which I need for some quests. I had to fix a few bugs I had with this as I wrote it quite a while ago in code. Now it is fully tidied up and also has Jack swinging his trusty Sledgehammer as a bonus.

So next up was to make it so Jack could use all his tools, or show he is using them when you chop wood, or pick plants etc. I have gotten the Axe put in as well, and will soon do the other tools, but I now have the method down and the way to animate Jack correctly. Pretty sweet I think.

Laters
Da Voodoochief

New Flowers Created

That gif above is only my second Gif. Which is a little annoying to me as I promised myself I would create a number of them to show off parts of the game. I am happy however with the way this one turned out. This is one of the new flowers I just put into the game and it is a bluebell. This flower grows like this over several hours, not like it is above.

I also put in the Hibiscus flower and that looks o. Bit disappointed so no doubt I will be revisiting that at some point soon.

I have also been very busy working on the cave... that thing is a monster and taking up so much time. Still I also got a couple of the Lantern quests done for it. The other Major thing I have been working on and have at about 90% is Quinns Tower. The inside this time, which is a new scene. Bringing my total up to 36 scenes for this game! Wowza, I never ever thought it would be half this big. Well actually that's a bit of a lie as I did expect it to be about 18 scenes in size.

I am stoked with Quinns tower, and it only has a few extra things to do to complete it and that makes me feel good. One more scene done means one less to go.

I am going to go back to working on quests while I also try and get the Cave finished. Wish me luck.

Merry Christmas,

Da Voodoochief