Space Farm devlog 8

Hello again!  I've managed to start squeezing in an hour or two here and there this week, which is abnormal for me.  Usually I end up only devoting a few hours of my weekend to Space Farm, if even that, so it's kinda fun to see repro pushes dated "34 hours ago" instead of "2 weeks ago".  Since I've made some little bits of progress here and there, I'll try to keep this update little.

I've finally added a seed maker machine, which has been sitting in my todo list for a pretty long time.  As the name implies, this machine will convert a crop into its corresponding seed.  Code-wise it's relatively simple-- I added a new prefab that copied my sawmill, named it accordingly, checked the necessary checkboxes to mark it a container that can process things, and then dropped in a recipe for turning turnips into turnip seed bags.  At this point I'm not sure if it should continue using manually-created recipes or if I can make it "smart" enough to grab the crop's itemID and convert that into the corresponding seed bag's itemID.  It seems like a nifty change to make, but I might want to have some crops that you can't make seeds for-- that will be a design decision for future Caitlin.

I also took a few minutes to add in support for multiple output items from recipes.  I had been putting this off because it sounded scary, but it ended up being pretty trivial.  Most of the code was already there but hard-coded to use index 0 of the output item list-- I just needed to add a for loop that would cycle through the entire list.  Took like 5 minutes.

On the topic of recipes, adding the turnip seed bag recipe showed me pretty quick that my fancy recipe loading code could only handle one recipe, not multiple.  As I subtly alluded to in devlog 5, I was not super confident about blindly copy/pasting code from a tutorial, so I half-expected to run into this very issue once I added a second recipe.  After a bout of clicking on the same Google results over and over but not understanding what I was reading, I realized the issue-- I was trying to treat the JSON data as an array of recipes, but I didn't actually define its class as an array, but rather one single recipe.

Hopefully the commented out code can help you see what I mean here.  Originally the top class was just "RecipeData" and contained the commented out code.  This meant that when I read the JSON into a RecipeData object, it tried to cram the file into one RecipeData object.  This works fine when there's only one in there, but the editor got really confused when it found more data in the file after that.  To remedy this, I updated the top class to be a RecipeDataList class, and had it contain a list of RecipeData classes.  Now I read the JSON into a RecipeDataList object and it's perfectly happy to do so.  Having a class that has a list full of other classes which also have two lists of additional classes each makes my pea brain hurt, but it seems to work.

After getting all of the above checked in, I realized that my codebase was littered with a lot of junk, such as old commented out code and todos that had long since been completed.  I took some time to hunt through my classes (with the help of Visual Studio's fancy task list window that will look for standard "to do" comments and add them to a list for you!) and tidied up.  It feels a little like busywork at this point, but 15 minutes here and there will probably save me hours of clean-up later on when I can't remember what on earth that todo item was supposed to mean.

Unfortunately I still have a healthy bit of design decision paralysis going on, so I'll probably continue on with the little tasks in my Trello board for now and play some games for "research" in the meantime.

Space Farm devlog 7

I've been putting off writing this post because I'm not super proud of my most recent progress.  It's pretty messy and I have pretty much no idea what I'm doing.  I'm talking, of course, about UI.

UI graphics are courtesy of Kenney NL who is doing a wonderful thing by giving dorks like me access to some really nice art.  Visit his site here.

Yep, that's my player inventory as of my last code check-in.  I only got this far after hours of trying to follow a tutorial video series (why are they always videos?!) but getting distracted by the dogs every 10 minutes.  Ugh, I'm stressed out just thinking about it.

It looks pretty darn funky, but it does a couple kinda neat things already-- it can load icons based on the item (or lack of item) in a slot, as well as display the number of items in the stack in that slot.  It can also be opened or closed via button press.  The UI element itself is made up of a couple layers of panels and then some prefabs for the item slots.

The idea here was to have one version of the element that could be used by all the inventories in the game, but I'm already finding design flaws in this approach.  I'll likely end up using this more as a template for future inventory screens, assuming I keep any of this mess at all.

In the meantime, I've been trying to sort out some overall game design questions I've left unanswered for a little too long.  I need to get something nailed down for a core gameplay loop so I can build it and see if it's any good, but there are a few different directions I could take this basic "farming game but in space" idea.  I just might have to go play some of my inspiration games for ideas!

Space Farm devlog 6

I'm not quite sure how frequently I should update this log, so enjoy a relatively short post while I try to figure that out!

As mentioned in devlog #5, I recently updated my prefab management process to allow for easier loading via script.  So for this work session I focused on cleaning things up to work in this new system.  Almost all of my prefabs are now in the Resources folder and renamed to use a standardized naming convention that I hope I won't decide to change again later.  The exceptions here were the things I'm not sure how I'm going to handle yet, namely the plants.  I'm assuming I'll eventually follow the same process I followed for items, but I'll save that for another time.

I found a couple interesting features of the Inspector pane during this reorg.  The good-- renaming and moving the prefabs in my Projects pane did not seem to break the links that already existed in the Inspector.  Hooray!  The bad-- I cannot for the life of me figure out how to reset just one field of a prefab back to the default I added in the code.  I can reset the whole thing, of course, but that's kinda overkill when I just want the "recipe name" field to update on my Sawmill prefab.  I struggled to Google the issue, as the keywords picked up a lot of similar-but-not-quite-matching forum questions.  However, the Sawmill is the only building that can craft things right now, so it's not exactly an urgent matter.

My Trello board is starting to fill up, and many of the old cards are tagged as "art" and "UI" tasks.  I'm still not sure how I ought to handle art-- hiring out sounds wonderful, but it's early enough in the project that really spending time or money on legit models seems a little silly.  I'll probably have to just keep suffering through my "I spent 30 minutes in Maya throwing something together" programmer art for the foreseeable future.