Dev Log #4.9 - Buildings Integration
Niwl Games
- 2 minutes read - 386 wordsKhaleer Finished the first Crane. The final game will have up to three different models of cranes.
Honora integrated the scrapyard in game (with help from Giiba).
This is a first step to integrating art assets in game, but hold on, not so fast.
We wanted to add a quick mouseover effect (so you know which building is selected) and it took much more time than anticipated as soon as art assets were involved.
This took only a couple of minutes.
Then we tried using collision meshes and AABB, it took hours.
Once again, we got a reminder that integrating the art assets should come after (in priority) to the speed of iteration for gameplay. We keep wanting to make the levels prettier and end up in the same trap even though we know better. Game dev is hard 😳.
This is why I still have Blender for lookdev and iterating on style target.
Here are two lookdev screenshots, showing the quality of lighting we want to go for in the final game.
Morning lighting.
I might take us a while, but I believe we’ll get there!
Giiba made a weather randomizer:
Where the orange markers are every 8 hours, and:
- green = sunny
- white = overcast
- blue = rain
- red = storm
Giiba also made a plan for how we handle the ship data and save it to disk.
Honora started planning out a feature for multi-part expeditions with a custom map.
Specifications: multi part expeditions get 3 to 4 nodes. each node is its own regular expedition and can be done multiple time until the player succeeds. We need the ability to hide future nodes, and change the state of the map (incrementing a jpeg number is good enough for me).
Example: you need a ROV for underwater LIDAR mapping, then you discover not just the shipwreck but also a cave, which you scan in a second expedition. In the third expedition, you send a diving team and find an abandoned cold war submarine station.
See you in a few weeks for more info on events and expeditions!
A note from Honora: I can’t tell you how much I want to be able to work on The Shipyard full-time. Thank you to all the Patreon supporters who are making that dream closer to reality.