The Future
I have been conducting one on one dm interviews with various fans on the discord about what they like / dislike and how they feel about the direction of Unfolding. What I've learned so far is that there are many processes in Unfolding that feel clunky and unintuive that I want to address. IE the windowed mode meant that workflow kept on getting inturrupted as well as the popups would stop the flow of writing. One interesting point was how because of how Unfolding doesn't have a paint / drawing program to create images it meant that some designers would have no way of creating new assets. I assumed users would use other drawing programs to add new images however that's coming from a position of privilege of me having experience in photoshop / aesprite / pixel art.
I've also learned users want more options and the ability to tweak in real time which is why I've added the options for water to flow and push the player in directions. The ability to change wave sizes as well as the ability to change the water's y position through dynamic actions. Having more dimensions to fine tune the engine is something many people have been wanting.
Working out what to focus on next is going to be tricky.
Overall I'm getting closer and closer to getting the engine completely stable and stopping the most obvious bugs. Keep letting me know of the ones I keep missing.
What I learned
I learned that the key feature of what makes the Unfolding philosophy of design strong is that it has multiple simple parts that interface in simple ways. For instance I made the incremental maker now only have 2 parts to it and can be placed into the world. The previous builds had a system that had over 10 parts, upgrade mechanics, options for items vs producing money. However by making it only 2 parts and having it place into the world. The incremental system can now interface with the games world. Ie designers can place barriers in the world that are unlocked by defeating monsters or by gettings items.
Its taught me a general philosophy in the correct ui design philosophy which I outlined in the manual. Rule 10 https://barchboi.gitbook.io/unfolding-engine-manual/philosophy .
My own personal ideas / culture of where the engine should go keeps getting the way of understanding the best place to go so you guy's perspectives are always good for keeping the engine getting better.
Patch Notes
- Cell Loader now has static stress on it
- Moved lights to the weather tab
- Added a Alt + Zoom key to allow toedit the entire scene at once
water now has more features such as the ability to customise the wave type as well as applying water flow to the water.
- Added a dynamic water placement allowing for the ability to move water levels in the cell.
- Polygons are now in game allowing the ability to make 4 polygon versions of statics
- Incrementals are now simplier and are now only 2 options to create one. Producers and the cost to create.
- Fixed a visual glitch with containers
- Player now spawns in the center of the cell instead of top left
-default water is now blue and transparent
