Plow and Hoe

Sometimes I'm thankful that I don't have any followers. Looking at my last post I have to say its been a while.

Alright, so I've been slowly working on the MVP for the “farming simulator” I mentioned last post or so. I still have a very long way to go needless to say.

So far I managed to work out the issue I was having with isometric tiles. Although I haven't made anything but the grass tiles, but I don't think there will be any problem with more ridged designs like bricks or cobblestones.

As you can see in the picture above I have a basic UI layout. The upper left will be a status window. I've decided to rework it so it can show followers and pets (ie:party members). Not sure if I'll condense it in the corner or have a more on the side layout, I'm trying to keep the UI generally out of the players field of view. Sizing can come later I guess. Nothing is functional on it yet.

The upper right has the clock. Its just a prototype right now, I defiantly want to polish it later. I have it animated and the idea looks decent. I've also been practicing with a color filter that goes over the screen space to show light gradients. I think I'm going to make the days 15 real world minuets and may have to break up the animation for the clock in parts as Godot only supports animations only so long. At least that was v3.0, I just upgraded to v3.1 so I'll have to check if it supports longer animations. Even if it doesn't I don't see a problem breaking up the animation cycle and linking it in code.

And on the lower left is the quick slot bar (well I kind of made it look like gears). I plan to make this game primarily focused on using a hand held controller. I thought about giving it mouse support like in Stardew Valley, but ultimately decided that I wanted this game to play more like the old Harvest Moon. I don't have any programming done on the “bar” yet but what I'm trying to achieve is a place to allocate items that are not equip-able but will be used in certain areas (ie:having seeds in the active slot will allow you to sow seeds on tilled soil or have an option to give gifts to NPC's). The default button layout will use the L or R buttons to rotate the gear and set an item on the wheel to the active position.

The lower Right has nothing so far, but I may put an active equipment (like tools or weapons) Icon there.

I'd also like to make a ring menu system like in Secret of Mana. That will be an interesting challenge.

Getting back to the tiles, I had to work out a solution to show soil when the tile is “tilled”. Godot's auto tile system doesn't really work well with isometric tiles (at least from what I could tell) and I don't think I can have complex data in a tile manager. Thankfully I managed to devised a walk-around using raycast and area collides. It took me 3-4 days but now the tiles transition properly from grass to soil.

Anyway that's it for now.

X-Mas Break 2018

Hey all. Its been a while since my last post so I figured I should do an update post.

As usual the winter saps me of my strength, both mental and physical. I'll spare the details, but needless to say I've been epicly unproductive.

The above statement is a little on the glass half empty side as I did manage to devise a workflow in creating isomeric tiles. The main issue I was having was with getting the alignment so seamlessly mesh together, but I solved that problem with a pretty simple grid in layer groups to help me offset things properly.

Another problem I faced was with layer masks, but thankfully the latest version of Gimp supports layer masks for groups which is going to make my life a lot easier since isometric tiles don't conform to typical standards. I still haven't put it to the test, so I'm going to hold off the party poppers. But I'm pretty sure it's going to work out when I get off my ass and do something with it.

During the break I've been trying to make simple stuff like the UI elements. I'm hoping to have some rough drafts of the basic HUD before the break is over.

I So Metric

So, since the last post I've been brainstorming on ideas, writing up what a MVP would look like and doing some concepts for the “Harvest Moonisk” game I mentioned last time.

I've started modelling the PC and got though most of the retopology for the main body. After that I have to model hair, cloths and a few parts of his anatomy I was saving for after I have the main mesh made. Then there is rigging, materials and what not. The materials that are used in the Toon Kit add on I bought a few months ago look impressive enough to use instead of the Blender internal material that I typically use. The problem is the line art functionally is nowhere near as good as freestyle. I know that I could probably just run a color pass in Cycles then run a freestyle pass in BI and finally combine them in some kind of raiser imaging software like Gimp, but doing that for animation frames would be tedious to put it mildly.... I'll have to look up a more stream lined way unless the technology improves by the time it comes to print my animation frames.

So after much deliberation, I thought that my life would be too easy by just sticking to plain ordinary birds eye view tiles. So the solution I came up with is to make ISOMETRIC tiles!..... But seriously though, I remember my fond memories of playing Harvest Moon 64, and even though I know that it was partially 3D and you could pan the camera, I typically played it in isometric view. Some of the most interesting 2D games I've played used an isometric view, so naturally I would like to at least try to make it work. So far I have the basics down and can make some bland tiles. The real trick will be making more complicated textures seamless

Things seem to be moving smoothly so far. Real life keeps throwing me some curve balls but I've still managed to (mostly) keep doing something daily.

In not so gamey news I finally went to an anime convention (called N2U) around my neck of the woods.

It pretty much turned out how I though it would. If I had to summarize the city I live in, in one phrase, it would be “ho hum”. That's pretty much how I would rate the convention.

Now to be fair I didn't stay that long and It may have ramped up later and I may have actually enjoyed myself more. But after the first “panel” doing a 180 in subverting my expectations, the lack of events and overall small size of the convention, my inability to mesh properly in crowds of people that I don't know and the fact that the transmission in my only working transportation is trying to break free of its constraints (yes this is as bad as it sounds). I couldn't relax enough to try and enjoy myself. I bought a weekend pass but will probably forgo tomorrow.

So my rating in paragraphs:

Market: Had some OK stuff but was wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy too small. The event planer had some trouble with the venue the first time and had to refund everyone, they managed to get the “issue” sorted out and started selling tickets again. I suspect that most of the people made other plans instead of signing back up. Nice variety, but way too small.

Anime Theater: Like seriously, I know that this was a small convention, but showing just the first or first two episodes of anime that has already been aired was kind of lackluster. Maybe getting the licenses for fall anime just premiering for the fall season was out of scope, but they could have at least showed anime movies instead. Good way to waste time quietly while waiting for friends I guess.

Game Center: This wasn't too bad. They had a nice variety of consoles set up and for people that like co-op fighting games. They had a few collectors edition NES, SNES, Genesis and a few Xbox and Playstations.

Panels: Maybe they had some better panels lined up before the first cancellation but..... If the idea was to get rid of me, they did a good job at that /s.

The first “panel” was get the audience to draw a pose then show it to the speaker so he can rate it..... Seriously. Maybe this was fun to the younger members of the audience, but my idea of a panel is the speaker(s) talk about a subject, then members of the audience ask questions/make comments in turn. Maybe there were “better” panels later on but everything just finally came down for me and I had enough.

I'll have to give the organizers credit though. I'm sure it was hard to restart the event right after telling everyone that made plans, cancelled them, then to restart. I suspect that some of them didn't even bother to sign up again. This is the size of event that you go to when you know at least a few of the people that are going there or are meeting up with friends to go together. Maybe next time I won't have so much to worry about and I can try to enjoy myself more. I'll probably be aiming for a larger convention though.