Super secret mystery:

What do the following names have in common:


Jim Potatogazer
Dr. Sam Chickenson
Quincy Soupburger
Aberdeen Cabbagemonger
Gertrude Pierogismith
Brian Bananaburger
Good Ol Liz Porkwich

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They all can be made with my new random name generator!  And saved and loaded into xml files.

Hopefully by the end of the weekend, I'll have my random generator generator all done, which will be super cool.  It's a Unity Editor addon that lets you build the parameters for a random generator, and then enter a whole bunch of data at once for it to easily parse into its component parts.  Then you can just call the random generator script from anywhere!  It's gonna be pretty sweet.

Ooh! I figured out how to make my game look like crap!

Until I work on the shaders, every new thing I add will probably make my game look shittier.  But whatevs.  Over the course of the weekend, I managed to make a whole bunch of changes that manifested themselves in this amazingly beautiful train-wreck of progress:

Yes, those are untextured archers shooting spheres with trail-renderers slapped on them for good measure, untextured trees that I just said "make them green", that skybox texture with the paste on clouds, and a bunch of low-poly plants that, you can't tell from here, I actually made out of origami, photographed, and slapped onto a model.  They will be so super cool.  You know, when they stop being shitty.

See?  You can see the potential here, right?  I swear this will look way better when it has a quality looking texture on it and not GREEN.  UNITY DEFAULT SHADERS MAKE ME GREEN NOW.

And this is the untextured-but-otherwise-finished animated book.  Depending on how much processing power it takes to make this sucker go, I might want to use this for pretty much all of the menus ever.  And maybe just make some interactive books on the iPad for mad cash (zero cash).

A bit of functionality, a lot of fluff.

I feel like I'm in a mode where I really want to develop more of the basic game mechanics so that I can get to having something really playable, but I also feel like a lot of the game mechanics won't be exactly that exciting without a bunch of different units.  For example, I just made it so that you can select which units you want to summon, and you can only buy them if you have enough money for them.

But as suspected, when your only units are "tower" and "knight", it's really not particularly exciting.  So I started working on some graphics for more dudes.

I fixed the archer animation.  Now he has a normal idle stance and a combat idle stance, so he doesn't go back to standing straight every time he fires an arrow.

Yes I need to fix the weighting on this mesh it is terrible.  But I also got a lot of work done on the story mode GUI.  And by that I mean "modeling a big ol' book."

Now that I see it laid out like that, I feel way more productive.

Boringest progress!

Well, I spent all weekend doing some work that really needed doing.  I rewrote units and squares and how they reference eachother.  Now, instead of using Unity's built-in move-to script, I just manually adjust the position over time.  This allows me to continually keep a reference in each object to what square it's standing on, which will be really helpful for targeting things and selecting units.  And it means that I can move people without using character controllers, which means that dudes no longer walk into and over towers.  They just walk through them.  I mean, I can decide how I want collisions of friendly units to work later.  I just like that I can choose how they work, and not "it automatically breaks your game."

I also did some work on shaders, and they're still a mystery to me.  I did do some messing around with a selectively transparent shader that let me script "make objects transparent when the mouse cursor is behind them" but I then turned that functionality off because it looked shitty and made me mad.  I need to work on writing my own shaders.  That's just super-de-duper low-priority right now.

In other news, I also made a male mesh.  This one is going to be for my sexually objectified elf archers.  I like it a lot actually.  I simplified the rig, and the features, and the fact that he doesn't have a face makes him way less uncanny valley creepy.  I might just make multiple copies of this guy and edit the mesh for different units.  Then I could really easy put a lot of customization and animation into the face by doing it with paper paste-on cutout-style instead of modeling one.

Also, my foot hurts so I can't deadlift, so elfman is doing it for me.

Towers!

There is  still a lot to be done with ironing out the way the code is set up, but towers are a thing now.

What you are looking at is a bear walking towards a knight sitting in a tower.  What will happen here is that the bear will pound away at the tower while the knight attacks the bear.  The knight attacks as normal, but doesn't move.

I need to redo movement and the cursor, but with this kind of architecture, I think I could do really neat things.  Like, you could theoretically mount any unit on top of any other unit, and the "top" unit would do the attacking while the "bottom" unit did the defending.  I need to think about how I want this to work.

STOP... ... ... Pause Menu Time!

I started labeling my images with the date, and then if I had more than one from one day sticking the time on there.  This makes things mildly depressing.

I made this mockup at 9:45.

Aaaaaand this one that's actually in the game says 11:15.

But hey, I've got a PAUSE MENU that WORKS.

Saturdays are pretty much the best.

I got a bunch of real life stuff done today, and still had plenty of time for game work. I don't, however, have time to demonstrate it in an exciting way. But my bears now move and attack properly, they look like bears, and they drop coins in the correct locations, and knights cost money to summon. That's the basic functions of the battle system mostly done. Now I all I need is a GUI, a story mode, a kingdom editor, a system for procedurally generating content, and like a bazillion more models and units!

Also sounds. Lots of sounds.