Overview
As you may notice, this update is a little late. The month of July has been pretty busy so I couldn't work on The Perfect Bowl as much. Additionally most of the work done is on systems so there isn't much going on visually. I suspect this would be the trend moving forward as I would also be focusing on the actual meat of the game which is story related stuff.
Features
Unity Dialogue System Plugin
This is where the bulk of my time working on The Perfect Bowl has been.
Trying to pickup a new system is time consuming but from what I've seen so far, this would be worth it in the long run.
Shifting viewports
Getting this to work was quite tricky.
This was done using two cameras, manipulating their viewport transforms and FOVs using Tweens.
It took me awhile to understand that I had to make sure I had two separate post processing volumes covering each camera so that each camera has their own bokeh effect.
Also each camera needed to have its own "UI Camera" as I wanted the dialogue UI only to appear in the customers side.
The most tedious part however was needing to change the anchor values for ALL the UI in the assembly viewport. When I started development, I did not anticipate the need for two separate dynamic viewports (which was dumb in hindsight) and made the UI work only for a full screen viewport.
Writing The Narrative
The part that I dread the most ːsteamsadː
For all its pretty visuals, The Perfect Bowl is actually a narrative game first and foremost which means there is a lot of stress in making a really good story with memorable characters.
To be honest, I tried putting this off to a later stage because:
- I've been thinking about it as much as possible before I start on it
- I'm scared to do this part
But the time has finally come where I cannot delay this any further. If I'm to make a player (or publisher) remotely interested in continuing the The Perfect Bowl, I'd have to start now. I've done my research and understand that writing is an iterative process just like game development so I just have to trust the process and know that it will get better over time.
Bug Fixing
Didn't work on any bug fixing this time.
