February 2020 Devlog

Game

Bright Red Skies

5 years ago

February 2020 Devlog

For February, the starting town was completed and there was some clean up on character interactions and the UI. I wanted to make sure that the first town was completed so I can comfortably work on other tasks in the backlog.

Finished Building Interiors

Near the end of last month, the building interiors started to get implemented and now they're all completed! In the starting town, there are three main areas that can be entered: the jail, the living quarters, and the academy. There is going to be story related content inside of the jail and academy, but the living quarters is there to give a better idea of the personality of some of the characters.

After showing off the living quarters interior on social media, I got a recommendation to add some transition fading:

UI Polish

There were some minor graphical/cosmetic bugs related to the speech bubbles and activating the item shop which were resolved. Previously, the "..." would disappear after some time and you wouldn't be able to retrigger the same character's speech bubble without looking away. Fixing it for interactable characters also fixed it for the item shops, so that's one less thing to worry about now. Additionally, the minimap used to be custom drawn, but now it's more modular making it easier to edit and iterate if a map layout is changed.

Item Shop Controller Support

Most of the game already has controller support, but the item shop was something that still needed to be reworked to be able to support controllers. Fortunately, the base classes for controller supported UI elements like a vertical scroll bar for item selection, and tab toggle of item type selection, was already implemented. Unfortunately, the item shop UI was one of the first things implemented when the project started so the code wasn't written as clean as it is today. That means, a good amount of time was spent refactoring the item shop related code and prefabs.

Behind the Scenes

This is a section of the devlog where I like to talk about the parts of the game that were improved but aren't necessarily big enough to have their own section. For February some of the extra things completed were:

Updated the run animation and transition.
Fixed issue with laggy camera transition when moving between town locations.
Fixed issue with control focus when speaking to a character or in an item shop.

Going Forward

With the starting town completed, it's time to start working more on the story related content. I wanted to start working on the intro cutscene, last month, so for March I really want to complete the intro sequence. So, the list of things I want to get done are: