There hasn't been information on the game since June, so I wanted to make an announcement on what I've been doing since then. Aside from that, I do post some development screenshots in the Discord.
July
- Specimen additions. ○ Catching on fire - particles, dissolving shader, and death. ○ Paper physics - when they fall, it's more like dropping a sheet of paper. ○ Actions - they're able to perform arbitrary actions like standing up after falling, walking, sitting, working out, or dabbing. (The animations and AI are incomplete, but the implementation is there.)
- Event manager for events and a basic implementation - The Fire Tornado. Ideally it'll move around the conveyor belt as if out of control.
- Terminal station - basic implementation and UI prototype.
- Spawning - gave probability!
- Performance improvements. ○ Spawning - uses a single raycast to predict where to spawn on the conveyor belt instead of just: spawn in the air, fall, sleep on conveyor belt. This saves a lot of physics calculations. ○ Drawing names - can show more Specimen on the screen if their names aren't hindering performance!
August
- Different types of save games - quick, manual, and automatic.
- Smooth free looking when at the conveyor belt or similar stations.
- (First) major redesign of the level. Tried a Japanese styled room but it didn't really fit the atmosphere of the game.
- Terrain/habitat improvements. ○ New terrain generation algorithms - also adds paths, center landmarks (just a mountain at the moment), and biomes. ○ New habitat controls - more comfortable and finer control than before. ○ Tree imposters - 1 quad, 1 texture, 36 perspectives per tree.
September
- Terrain/habitat improvements. ○ New AI path finding - they use paths. Their core AI still needs work. ○ Residents are drawn as emoji, represented by their current emotions or statuses. Before they were statues but emojis can represent more information easily. I would like to transition into an animated model when you get close, but that might be technically difficult to accomplish.
- Some more performance improvements. ○ Dynamic quality of physics items. ○ Added material property blocks to items for variants.
- Made major changes to the chemistry system - introduced the concept of chemical atoms, compounds, and mixtures.
- Changed how information is displayed when holding items - it takes into account the new chemistry system and additional information items might have. For example, Specimen have personalities and that's displayed a little better now.
- Editor stuff. ○ Had to fix a custom tool for generating item icons quickly. ○ Unity corrupted most of my scenes' settings so I spent some time reassigning values. I had some backups which saved a little time but a lot was wasted on this. I also introduced Git to the development pipeline so this shouldn't happen again.
October
This month was a little slow for me.
- Ported to Unity's new Input System.
- (Final) major redesign of the level. Introduced the concept of the Hub which is the center room and is also an elevator! The minor stations like the habitat, terminal, etc. are in here. The major stations are connected to it, like the sorting station. ○ Had to change the habitat a bit to fit here. Square in the last redesign and now circular.
Conclusion
There might have been a lot of smaller things I missed. I have a checklist of things I need to do, and have done. Sometimes I forget to use it, which isn't good! Everything I am doing for the game isn't necessarily included on the to-do list. For example, items are a separate list, their configurations, individual skills and their functionality, achievements, animations, audio, bugs, and story elements like notes or scripts. I'm still the only person working on this project so doing it all myself can be hard to manage.