Devlog: December 2020
Well, it's certainly a bit weird writing December's update in January, after two weeks "out of office"... Trying to remember what got done is a little tricky, but let's have a look-see...
Updated Collection Book
The Collection Book is an interface in the game that lists all of the things you've caught in the game; including fish and insects. It's your primary record of what you've caught, what you've got left to catch, and your size records for each creature. The old UI was a bit limited, ugly, and very clunky; so it got replaced this month!
The new Interface is built with "The Future in Mind" (TM) so the layout is flexible and will easily allow us to add more creatures over time to the world, without having to spend time updating the Collection Book Interface.
Updated Collection Book
Alongside this there was a minor rework in how fish and insects are classified, and thus how they spawn in the world. Creatures are now separated into more distinct groups, and this makes it easier for the player to know where certain insects or fish can be caught, for example; and it also means we can more elegantly categorise them in the Collection Book. We've also been talking about attaching achievements to different categories too (for example catching 5 river fish)
Insect Behaviour
I went in and updated how the insects behave in the world; pretty much ripping out the old system and replacing it. Butterflies now have a stamina, and will fly for a while before needing to rest. I added the ability to add "land points" on objects, so that butterflies will land on one of these locations if there's one nearby. Locations can be rocks, bushes, flowers, trees and so on.
Butterfly resting on a rock
Art created a new butterfly mesh and textures this month and I added a simple skeleton to the mesh in order to give butterflies a more fluid set of animations.
Fishing Rework
I've been bothered by the fishing mini game in Hokko for a little while. Although it's fun and provides a nice challenge, I felt that it was very confusing and really hard to integrate visually into the rest of the experience. I'd been mulling over a big change to the mini game over the previous months, and decided to implement it in December. The old mini game was replaced with something that's less intrusive, less punishing, and hopefully a lot easier to understand. The mini game also allows us to expand the game with upgradable rods if we want to later on.
Updated fishing minigame
Alongside an updated minigame, I worked into the fish's behaviour. I changed how they spawn in the world to use a mesh instead of just spawning around a set point; this means we can set up a simple mesh that defines an area fish should be and they'll spawn and keep within that mesh. I also reworked how they detect bait to make their behaviour more understandable, and also... less stupid (often they'd just swim past bait in front of them and you needed to be pretty accurate with where you cast your line, which wasn't very enjoyable!)
Adding other items to your creations
I made a minor tweak to the Design Tool to give players the ability to add other types of items to their creations. These objects can be flagged in Unity as items that can be used, and they'll show up in the new backpack section of the design tool. Right now this includes fish and insects, but we can flag any item we want players to be able to use in their designs.
Using Fish in a design
On top of this I worked into the villager requests to give them the ability to request designs using a specific item or theme. Villagers can now request a wooden chair, or a chair using butterflies in the design, for example. While I was in the code I also made their behaviour with design requests a bit more forgiving. If you don't spend very long on a design, or it's very basic, or you've not done what they've asked, they'll let you know and give you the item back for re-work; before they'd just be a bit miffed and take the item from you anyway, which meant it was hard to know what you'd done to upset them!
Tying stuff to real-world time
I quite like the feeling in games where there are changes that happen over real-world time; giving the player the excitement of coming back to the game every day to see what's new or changed. This can be things like what items are available in a store, what characters are in-town, that kind of thing. In Hokko this stuff was tied to game-time, which removed that "play a little a day" feeling you get from other titles. Although I don't want to tie the entirety of Hokko to real-world time, as I feel this limits the enjoyment you can get from the title (if you work during the daytime, the only part of a real-time game you can experience is the evening, which I think is unfair) I decided to make some parts of the experience connected to the real-world clock. These include what items are in stores, what characters will come visit your town, and how quickly things like weeds and dig-spots pop up. I think this change will give Hokko a good balance from both worlds.
Save game tweaks
I made some small but important changes to the save game system; I made the save games a bit less easy to cheat in, and I also set them up to store the game version too. Storing the game version in all files that I save means that we can better handle future updates that may have big changes that require converting save games and thus hopefully saves me a lot of pain in the future!
Main Menu
The Main Menu scene was updated this month with all the new art assets, the animations that Alex has provided, and the music from Chris. It was really wonderful being able to tie it all together; taking the idea I had originally and then using the parts created to build it and realise that vision!
Updated main menu
Emotes Chooser
Alex had done a bunch of emote animations for me over the previous months; these will be used in conversation, but also can now be triggered by the player. I added a simple menu that allows you to choose an emote to play; giving players an additional way of expressing themselves in the game! I'm looking forward to working into the conversation system when we have the new villagers in the game and giving them the emotes during conversations too.
Emote UI
Home start Layouts
Starting villagers now have stuff in their homes! Up until now they'd have an empty home, which wasn't exactly fair, so I made it so that starting characters will have fill their homes with stuff. We can define layouts for different types of villagers and then the system will use one of these layouts when the game sets up the town for the first time. Even though at the moment there's only one layout (art will be adding more later on) just having a home with stuff in, already in the town when you move in makes the world feel a lot more alive!
More Stuff!
The Artists got some more stuff into the game, including bits of furniture and instruments!
More Stuff!
Holiday Work
During the last week of my time off I spent a little time playing the game and doing some minor tweaks. Mostly small things that popped up during gameplay, and some other "non-essential" things I've wanted to get into the project for a while:
- I reworked the animation setup (again) for the avatar, and made things more immediate and hopefully less prone to error.
- I changed how rotation works in the Design Tool to make it less clunky and more useable on a gamepad. It felt horrible before but now feels pretty nice!
- I tweaked the speech bubble appearance, and worked into some areas of the UI to make them animate better and be more rewarding.
- All interfaces that allow you to pick a number (selling, crafting, etc) now let the player press left to "loop" the amount back around to the maximum amount; making selling all of an item, or crafting the maximum amount super easy!
- Set up the project using Assembly Definition files to break it into sections making compilation of changes quicker
- Separated logging into a custom function to allow easy control for turning it on/off
- Changed the function used for random numbers to one that's EVEN MORE RANDOM!
And there we have it. Turns out quite a bit got done in December, even though it was a short month!
I hope you've all had a relaxing festive period; I came back to the project full of energy and excitement and I'm really looking forward to 2021 and the year of Hokko!
Thanks for your support, and as always, let me know your thoughts in the comments!
from Robert