Happy Monday keepers! We managed to get all of the BEEEEEEEEEEEEE'S out of our heads since last week and have jumped back into action! We will not be sharing a lot today as 50% of our time was spent tinkering behind the scenes on areas that many players will not see.
Item Placement representation
In Shoppe Keep 1, players would see where they could place thier items with a green effect on furniture. However, once players expanded to a massive shop, some players began to experience FPS drops based on the sheer number of FX at any given time. We've changed the system in Shoppe Keep 2 and it now instead displays the shape of an item in the spot where it can be placed. This will assist us with performance but we also think it looks pretty cool too!
In game video!
In Shoppe Keep 1, a key concern was that players were put off by the tutorial as it contained a large portion of text. As we've transitioned to a new version of Unity we are now able to have the game read MP4 files which allows us to create much more compelling short videos to help players learn the ropes. We hope that this will allow Shoppe Keep 2 to be much more accessible.
Project Tools/ Performance
Unity allows us to create all sort of tools and custom inspectors that help out in creating games, we have a bunch of them already functioning and helping out the designers make NPC's, dialogs, items, spells etc. We will try and convert those tools into a separate application which should be able to let players add more content to the game which they want themselves in the future. More on this soon! Performance has been worked on this week, some moments in game introduced frame drops, and we are happy to say that such moments were mostly solved, and the biggest issue we saw was when our frames dropped to 29 fps, but after doing some optimisation they rose to 56, still not pure 60 FPS, but we will be optimising the game as mad men during the whole development process/EA and post launch until it is as best as it could be.
Context Buttons
Sometimes players may forget which button performs a particular action. We've polished up our UI which will remind you what to press when targeting something that is interactive. The button prompts dynamically change depending on what key is binded to what function. We might add an option to disable button prompts in the settings, a lot of newer gamers do that these days - I guess it helps with immersion
Footsteps
SK1 was basically just the same flat floor around the world, we got away with just 1 type of footstep sound, now as we have grassy hills, paved roads, sand, wooden floors, tile floors and many more, having just 1 sound wont cut it. Listen for it during our future gameplay videos, but your step/ npc step will feel more alive than ever!
Price setting
You can't run a profitable shop without setting a good price for your wares! When the shop is small enough you can easily go up to an item with your price gun and stamp a price straight on it! However, pricing can be a little more complicated once you have expanded. But have no fear we have created the Pricing UI
You can use it to check the items currently on display in your shoppe and how much each unit is sold for. No need to find the item on the shop floor, you can use this new UI to change the price straight away! Some more active friends may choose to put items on displays while you oversee the prices for each item from the comfort of the management house.
That's it for now! I am afraid that next week we will not be creating a dev log. Though if we can find some information to share that we can show you, we might do a smaller post! We're of course still developing the game, but some of the content we're working on might not be ready to show for a little while.
Stay tuned and thank you for your support!