Progress Update #2
Hello! This update took a bit longer due to crunching time constraints with our Educational work but things are still moving ahead and the game is taking shape. Some of the work done there is possibly planned to be moved over and modified to work here for New Outbreak. We will ke
Hello!
This update took a bit longer due to crunching time constraints with our Educational work but things are still moving ahead and the game is taking shape. Some of the work done there is possibly planned to be moved over and modified to work here for New Outbreak. We will keep the details hushed until we know how we might approach it and if we even will.
Things have been progressing since our last update with some new developments and implementations. We hope to have more frequent Progress updates like this as we get things set up and keep everyone informed on where we are.
We'll be talking about the main things that are core to the game and will be implemented and then at the end we'll discuss more experimental features that we are figuring out how to implement properly.
Generators
I feel this is a somewhat important change in how we approach the Generators, previously they would constantly consume fuel upon insertion and just power everything nearby, this is completely gone.
From now on Generators will require being connected to electronics to then power them, generators now will automatically hook themselves up upon start of a new game to their appropriate electronics and can be wired and disconnected at your will.
The more you connect the more power that will be consumed every cycle, of course only electronics turned on will also use power, so even if an entire house is wired up it will only power the things turned on therefore consuming less power.
Generators now should last 100x longer.
The UI is still very much being worked on, we need something flexible and expandable as we would like to offer different types of generators in the future, these could then vary depending on what types of building it is used for.
Hopefully this will be ready by next update and can be shown off.
Inventory
Inventory is now mostly finished, as seen in the last screenshots it was functioning however now it has every single item previously in New Outbreak with a custom randomiser which will be used in objects to create random loot.
Work is now being done on how to address equipment, such as clothing slots, in a presentable way, we want to make something that is similar to the direction of everything else which is simplistic and out of the way, leaving as much screen space as possible.
It's likely it will expand out of the already existing Inventory so it's all kept in that tab.
Experimental
Lighting!
(There's a lot of technical stuff so TL:DR Lighting will be 100% better however the different forms of lighting may vary depending on how well we get everything working together)
So Lighting in the GMS version was very poor, we had tried various versions of different lighting to get a better look but it either ended up too performance taxing or just didn't work.
Thankfully in Unity we are able to work with a real lighting system however there is a catch which is 2D Lighting currently isn't fully there, meaning you can't just place a sprite and a light down and expect a shadow, this is even more problematic with our Tilemap approach as we initially approached them by using diffused sprite materials which don't actually recieve shadows.
To get around all of this we use a normal material on our tilemaps that we want to recieve shadows, this alters them a bit however we are able to use a custom material to alter the coloring, this results in slight loss in quality however fully reciveable shadows.
This approach does work for our non tiled sprites...However sprites aren't designed for this and therefore sprites that aren't full squares like our tiles currently have graphical issues but we are working on it.
Below is the current Result of what the lighting looks like. We're still tweaking and adjusting it alongside Day and Night to get a nice look and feel to it.
That's all for this update, next update I hope to have the combat in a presentable way so it can be shown off.
Once we have all the nessesary gameplay features in we hope to also release a tab in the Beta section which will finally allow access to this version of the game, likely the map will still be in progress so it will just be a small taste of what is to come but we will allow you to try out all of the new features and mechanics.
We will also hopefully have a new questionaire setup by then so you guys can help us make the game better and give us feedback on the current state of the game and what you want out of it.
Thank You!
