Built by Boneidle
Wow, this week went by quickly! I'm finally starting to get a grasp on Unity and I'm very happy with the results I've managed to get. While I was leveling my Unity skills, Zun has continued to work on the happiness feature.
The UI is still primitive, but 'behind the scenes' a lot of progress has been made. The Happiness Menu now calculates a total happiness and the recruitment cost of colonists varies based on this happiness level. The causes of happiness and unhappiness are shown to the player. We added a setting to toggle happiness off.
Work in Progress
Now that the underlying systems are mostly functional, we're planning to add new content next week. We had hoped to get the "colonies with unique content in other biomes + trading" features ready before the end of the year, but I doubt that'll be 100% finished in 2018. Anyhow, there's a bunch of new features and testing them on a diverse range of hardware is always useful. We're still thinking of opening the beta (perhaps alpha is a better word) to the first group of testers around Christmas. It won't be a short, single event: the beta branch will be continuously updated.
We're preparing a form where all who are interested can apply. We're pretty sure the GDPR applies to the kind of data we'll be trying to gather, so we've got to figure that out as well. Short timeline:
- 7 December: today
- 14 December: next Friday Blog, probably includes Beta Application Form
- 21 December: last Friday Blog before Christmas
A screenshot from this week's game-experiment
When I first started learning programming and Unity, I had set my expectations very low. I would've been happy if I was able to make a half-decent interface by the end of 2018, and a very primitive game after more than a year of experience. But the basics are pretty intuitive, and Unity is a lot more user friendly than I thought on my first try. It's very exciting and I've been pretty addicted this week. Here are three short clips from my evolving prototype:
Prototype 1, when the AI navigation works
Prototype 2, with more weapons, a more walls and a hilarious spawn bug
Prototype 3, moving camera, more graphics effects
At the moment I'm still afraid that applying my current programming/Unity skills to Colony Survival will do more harm than good, but in a couple of months I might have enough experience to work on for example the interface. I'm looking forward to it!
I've gotten quite a few questions about which resources I used to learn these things. Everybody learns in a different way; there are books that were tremendously useful for Zun that I couldn't stand, and vice versa. You've got to find the things that work for you specifically, but this is what worked for me:
- The C# Programming Yellow Book by Rob Miles
- NoobTuts Unity UI tutorial
- Catlike Coding Unity Tutorials
- Brackeys Unity Tutorials
These resources + lots of Google + lots of asking other people (thanks Zun!) will get you pretty far :)
Bedankt voor het lezen!