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[whistlerat]

Getting back into dev after some unfortunate but necessary time away from it. Want to make and finish something quick.

For those who know about my other project, Monstrus is still 100% in progress, but I need something less slow-burning right now.

Aiming to post everyday or every other day with SOMETHING new. Want to get the gameplay framework done in a couple of weeks, absolute max. Then a similar amount of time on building something with it. Keeping the scope tighttighttight.

I've been working on this for two days so far.

Let's go.

[whistlerat]

Now we have biomes!!!, which are separate areas with their own look and local resources. Rather than have one big expansive map to get lost in, I decided I liked the idea of unlocking new but small areas to better control the gating of content. While this will be a town builder of sorts, it's super simplified and I want the available space itself in each biome to be a kind of resource too.

I wanted a more exciting visual but the biome-swapping stuff is buggy and I'll get a gif tomorrow, y'know, when that bit actually works.

The biome generation and biomes themselves work like darlings though. I love building a system, then making a bit of test content, pressing 'go' and having it just work first time. Yeah, I'm looking at you biome-swapper.

[whistlerat]

Biomes being able to properly exist in the same world with all their proper functionality is what a success story looks like. I wanted to make a few buildings for the purple biome to gather and process its lovely grey and green resources but only had a small amount of time to work this evening, so prioritized, y'know, making sure it wasn't fundamentally broken. Now I can make some more silly buildings next time!!

I thought it'd be nice to show a short gif of most of the functionality so far, which made me realise that I really need to add some visual indication that you've clicked on a resource node, but hey ho. That's what tomorrow's for.

[whistlerat]

Because I said I would.

[whistlerat]

Got to the end of today's session and realised that 90% of the work has been invisible under-the-hood stuff, so, realistically, a gif wouldn't be able to show much new stuff. You'll just have to trust me that this thing's heart grew by two sizes this day.

Oh, but I did explicitly separate 'harvest mode' from the other modes (build/destroy), so you can only manually tickle them nodes when you've got your harvest mode on. So there's that to show you.

[whistlerat]

Resource buildings got a lot of love today. A quick changelog:

- Gatherer buildings (the ones placed on nodes) can gather more than one resource at once
- Converter buildings can require multiple types of resource as input and output multiple resources
- When done with a cycle, a resource building will show you a quick animation of what they just produced above their progress bar (though only 3 max per type, just so you get the idea)
- Gatherer buildings can proc producing resources too (spot the red spheres sometimes coming off the orange gatherers)
- The choose-building buttons have been tweaked to properly show all this info (except actual rates and any proc resources)

Ran through how this all works with husband today, who is code-phobic and wants to make his own thing with this framework when I'm done. Pretty pleased that he found it all very accessible since you can add and change everything just via the inspector, so he doesn't have to risk opening his nemesis, Visual Studio, at all.

[whistlerat]

Just a quick one today because I didn't have much time because Infinity War woooo. I started working on the concept of populations, which will end up being a potential requirement for other buildings to function. A bit like They Are Billions, or Impressions games, or many other town builders. Soon they'll be able to need resources to be satisfied - and if unsatisfied they'll either not work or leave. Right now they're just another number, but that's what incrementals are, right? A bunch of changing numbers?

This is the changelog of the last hour and a half, then:
- Introduced populations, of which you can have multiple types with their own name and icon
- Introduced population buildings, which 'house' a certain number of population of a particular group, and increase/decrease the total amount of that population when built/destroyed

[Zireael]

Nice little animations and I love how you mentioned 'tickling' resource nodes

[whistlerat]

Nice little animations and I love how you mentioned 'tickling' resource nodes

They kinda look like they're giggling


I worked more on populations today, in the context of making it so that buildings can require a certain amount of population to be able to function. It's been more complex than I expected - probably the most complex bit of functionality so far - because I've structured it differently to resources. Resources are easy because the buildings that use them, just make regular requests to the global pool. If a request fails, the building stops working. When a request succeeds, it starts working again. Population is different because while a building does 'make a request' for its required population on creation, it never asks again while it is turned on. And this all works easy peasy while you're adding new buildings, but you can delete them too - so what happens when you delete a population building and it takes the global amount below the minimum amount necessary for all buildings to function?

My solution is about 75% done, but I'm still ironing out the kinks as I find them - and there are a lot, considering how straightforward the problem sounds. It's working enough to show some of the functionality in the customary daily gif, though you'll have to forgive my not yet adding any population info to the building buttons or overlays to show what they are actually using. I tend to do all that once the actual feature is working, so hopefully I can show something a little less cryptic tomorrow. (As a hint, each orange gatherer currently needs 50 miners to function.)

Yikes, this post almost sounded like one of my normally serious devlog entries... this is what interesting programming challenges do to me!! Hopefully it'll go back to being nice'n'easy after this so I can keep the pace going.

[whistlerat]

Am knackered tonight and don't have the mental energy to look at the population problem, or really any other problem, so I made some tier-2 level converters. Now my lovely refined mintfines and fairydusts can get turned into some high-grade 'iniums. This industry makes perfect sense.


Seriously though I like how lively it looks when you've got a bunch of buildings placed and working together.

[whistlerat]

Hey, so, funny story... that population problem that seemed so vexing ended up being one re-contextualised dictionary and two added lines of code to complete. Isn't it amazing what a non-exhausted brain can achieve in ten minutes. Though to be fair to my tired-self of two days ago, she was the one who got me 99% of the way there and just didn't realise it.

This means that where I had expected to just get the whole population-required-for-buildings working this evening, I managed to do that and add some of the necessary elements to the UI to show which buildings need what to be able to run, and to better explain what is happening when they stop.

On the gif: When deleting the population towers, I didn't realise that the existing population would be auto-redistributed between the orange and pick gatherers so flawlessly, since I didn't explicitly plan for it. Thought I'd have to test more. Am a happy programmer.

[whistlerat]

And so it was that, on the 12th day, the broad pass on populations was done. Hurrah.

They can now consume resources as a need - defined per building - which, if not satisfied, basically causes them to go on strike. But politely.

[whistlerat]

Unfortunately for you, today was another under-the-hood day, so once more you'll just have to take my word for it when I say that the buildings are cleverer than they were yesterday. Fortunately for me, this means lots of things are nicer to use! Plus bug squashin' and some more visual-feedback tweaking, that kinda good stuff. Planning to get onto unlocks and/or upgrades tomorrow, which is a fairly vital part of the incremental experience, and I'm excited!!

For today, here's a gif of more population stuff in action with a more full building economy, showing it struggle under the weight of too many and then be recovered by some swift and brutal bulldozing action. (Don't let me be in charge of any local councils.)

[whistlerat]

Spent some time thinking about the upgrade problem, did some tests, and that turned into yet another big ol' rejig. Was necessary, though, to allow upgrades to work in any elegant fashion, and now I'm in an excellent place to actually implement some tomorrow. For real this time. I was tempted to leap into it right away, but was left with the question of 'but where on this rapidly over-cramped screen do I shove some more buttons???'

So I made myself some room (I seem to have a thing for tab-based UI navigation in my games... in fact I may or may not have ripped some code straight out of Monstrus) and now there should be no more roadblocks on the way to upgradesville

[whistlerat]

So I wasn't able to get upgrades working because I found yet more things that needed changing...

Loljks.

[whistlerat]

Buildings are now upgradeable in almost every way. Gonna turn the individually-clickable upgrades into more of a 'group' of upgrades, so you can do things like increase the amount of population in a building but also quadrupling the amount of resource they need. Or just make skip the positive effect and make buildings objectively worse, y'know, I don't care.

The effects of these can be a little hard to tell in a gif, but my beautiful cursor assistant points out where you can spot the changes when it remembers to. Also please take no mind of the complete lack of choosing any storage upgrades, it isn't because those are currently broken, not at all...

[whistlerat]

Upgrades are basically done now. The only remaining things to do will be make sure they hook into every possible thing a building can do, and to let them work with the unlockable stuff which will be coming soon.

Quick upgrades overview:
- Upgrades can alter one or more aspects of building behaviour. This is universal for all buildings of that type
- They can cost resources
- They can be repeatably purchasable, or only purchasable once

I've not been updating the "% done" on the OP much, but I did a quick overview of what's been done so far vs what I still plan to do, and the end is definitely in sight. The main things I need to do are a quick revamp of the biome stuff to bring it in line with everything else, then the entire unlocking feature, then a thorough UI pass to add tooltips and more transparency to what's doing what, and then a quick editor-only pass to make the object inspectors not look like a dumpster fire of variables. I count 4 things in that list, so I'll say that is 40% left, because that is how gamedev works.

For now, here is the last upgrade-oriented gif. Once more, my beautiful assistant will help guide your eye.

[whistlerat]

Didn't have a whole lot of time this evening so I picked something relatively easy to add. Biomes have had some basic improvement like I promised - mostly to bring them up to the same standard as the other things which have been refactored over the last couple of days - and then I added a new biome, with its very own shiny new type of resource node! Check it out!

I'm really digging this colourful, weird, abstract theme. I think I'm gonna keep and refine it for the actual game I make with the framework when it's done.

[whistlerat]

I'm starting to notice a correlation between the days I'm at my job and the evenings in which I'm too tired to get anything meaty done... wonder why.

Decided to go for some small, low-hanging-fruit type tasks. Necessary but bite-sized, as it were. Easily digestible. Making work sound delicious makes it much more palatable. How long do you think I can keep going

The evening's main changes:
- Can now limit the number of times you can construct a certain building (this number will be added to the ways in which you can upgrade a building)
- The selection buttons reflect how many of each building are currently built, and the limit, if there is one
- Pressing F1 maxes out your resources. Should've have this devpower working a while ago really!

[whistlerat]

More biome love today! Although I'm toying with the idea of letting people hand-build their own biomes (with tile colours/images and node placement), right now every biome is randomly generated on game start. Up until now, the nodes have also been randomly placed, both in terms of quantity and placement. I wanted the developer to have more control than that.

Alongside setting exactly how many times you want a node to appear (which doesn't necessarily always work because of reasons, I'mma fix it) you can choose the distribution style! Either random, clustered, or veined. I'm not talking Minecraft level of procgen here, it's fairly straightforward. Clustered = spreads out from one tile in all directions. Veined = grows in a snaking line. Easy peasy.

Recursion is fun