State of the Game - August 24, 2024

Hey there, everyone. It's been a weird couple of months. I'm not entirely sure how to start, so I'll just go into what I've been up to.

INVENTORY

This current update was originally supposed to be nothing more than an inventory update. I've heard your input about wanting things like item sorting and better crafting navigation. Believe me, I want those too.

When developing Version 1.0, I decided to use an inventory system from the asset store (store assets and Unity itself get a bad rep because of low quality asset-flip games, but they exist to help developers. Use them if you need to. There's no shame) because I didn't want to remake my system from 0.5 from scratch.

But that came with some limitations. Doing anything within the systems' boundaries is perfectly fine. But it wasn't designed to be added on to it to make it do anything it inherently can't. This is why item sorting hasn't been in the game, despite being frequently requested. And why the crafting screen is kinda finicky.

So now I've decided to bite the bullet and just remake my 0.5 inventory system from scratch. It's dumb work I don't want to do, and it's money down the drain, but I'd rather have a system I can work with flexibly than having to continuously makes posts in their support Discord server trying to figure out how to do something the asset can't actually do.

So far, I've made a system that converts the food from the asset store's inventory system to my inventory system, as well as a bunch of different types of sorting, and a display that shows the flavors of every food. You can see the progress of that here:

https://streamable.com/m28z16

This still needs to be done for the other item types like badges and rooms. As well as all the shops and crafting menu... so wish me luck with that.

MULTIPLE OCCUPANCY

So, having to rework the whole inventory system has been a bit of a road bump. Because you can't just edit the inventory system. You also have to edit all the other systems that interact with in the inventory in any way. This has led to me to refactor a lot of code. Without getting into too much detail, it's ended up with me having to rework how citizens spawn in-game. I know that one feature that's been heavily requested is some sort of character interaction between citizens. But the systems in the game only account for there being one character on screen at any given time. But after a lot more code refactoring, I managed to pull off this:

 Two citizens spawning in the same room, retaining all their proper designs, clothing, weight, and stats. This might not seem like a huge deal, especially considering they can't actually do anything with each other yet. But I had to break a bunch of stuff to pull this off correctly. Stuff that now needs to be fixed... along with everything else.

CHARACTER REDESIGN

So, I'm aware that the current citizen model has issues. All the clothing clipping, the "frying pan face", sunken in immobiles. These are things I've been wanting to fix with one last character redesign that remedies these problems and more. You've seen images of the new model in past Patreon posts. The thing is, that big change was planned for later down the line, not for this update. But I figured, if I already have to refactor a ton of code dealing with how characters spawn in with all their assets, I might as well do it with the correct type of character rather than having to do it once now. Then again in like a month or two. It's gonna be tough to handle, but ultimately, it'll be for the best. There's a lot more to the redesign that I haven't told you yet, I'll fill you all in on that soon as I have more to show. I've just finished transferring the animations from the old model to the new one.

So that's a "concise" rundown of what I've been up to. Apologies for not writing a formal update in a while. Wish me luck with all this code refactoring garbage. See you soon!