February 2022 Update!

February has been an incredibly productive month! 

The gargantuan UI Project has been under way for a while now, but thanks to Kent we now have working tooltips ready to program on all our elements that need them, and they can link to sub-tips that hyperlink to the in-game encyclopedia, the specific place that stat is stored, and where an item or quest objective is located in the world.

It can't be overstated how powerful this is. You can always hover the house over an element and immediately know what that is used for, get a helpful hint, and link yourself to any relevant info you might need to make a decision.

In a game like this such a feature is core to making the concept work. So it's great to see it working.

Allegra also put in significant time in January and the start of February getting all our Skill Class icons done. 

These are obviously fantastic looking, and really communicate what each skill group is about. 

We also finished the demo of our Negotiation Card game, which is now to a point where it's ready to code and iterate upon as soon as we can reach that stage of the game's development. It's a huge relief having such a vital feature planned out and reliable. That was out last big tech & design risk.

This will obviously require many months of development in the future and many more of testing and balancing. It's the most unique dialogue system I've ever seen, so it also comes with unique hurdles. But it's far less of a mess than we originally calculated for and also more fun. Being able to turn dialogue into a game, not just a multiple choice answer test, is huge. Every conversation becomes just a little bit different, with distinct challenges, solutions, and outcomes. No matter how many times you play Morningstar's dialogue mini-game, you'll be surprised by something you hadn't quite expected. Be it a character revealing a betrayal or setting up a trade convoy, you'll have an interesting set of choices to make based on what you've done as you played. 

Kent also worked hard on our Drag & Drop interface for the inventory system. You can now grab an item, drag it to the world to get rid of it / drop it, transfer it between companions and your own wearable items or their inventories. Split stacks, etc.

Combined with the tooltip popups we have a very robust system now for inventory management. 

In a game like this where items mean so much, this was another make-or-break point in the design. We can't just have *another inventory system.*

We needed a better one.

This 3 pane approach should wildly alleviate the headache of managing a party of characters with distinct wants & needs, all their backpack space, outfits, weapons, tools, etc. You always have the person you want to trade items with right next to you, so you can swap items between them and yourself, between multiple party members. Never struggle with trying to remember if Gauis has that gold dagger in his backpack or if it's in Ingvar's right hand. You can just show them side by side and choose who gets what in one menu you never have to leave. 

Powering all this is an event bus and the Unity Canvas system, which together required a huge amount of work. On top of that, this system uses widgets which define the width and height of each element and sub-element, so that Modders will one day be able to add their own purely by defining their x,y and contents.

Ships in the test-environment.

On the cool gameplay feature front, we have begun to work on our Boats and Wagons!

We got these into Unity and they're looking pretty good! It turns out making modular boats is a major undertaking and there were a lot of way we could go to attempt it. We decided on using a hyper-modular approach so boats can be just 2 pieces (front & back) or up to 6 middle pieces and two front & back pieces long. Each faction is getting a unique bow piece and their own sail, so they'll look distinct.

Same with Wagons, they are also getting new art.

This has required a lot of rethinking abut how we approach containers and structures.

While they are being built, Boats and Wagons are going to be STATIC, just like a building. But as soon as they are deployed, you'll guide them just like a character in the world, and this MOBILE unit now follows you.

Because our game is fully 2D, things like our Items don't have the ability to rotate. But when they are in a Crate, we do want the ability to see at a glance "oh, this crate is full of miscellaneous junk," or, "this is a crate of wheat.

We will probably end up just putting the lid on top of these crates as they rotate on ships and wagons, and rely on manually selecting the crate to see what's inside. But this was an interesting test of the flexibility of our system.

The Tactical Menu Popup got its art this month as well.

These icons are going to empower you to give out job assignments such as "cut these trees" or "deconstruct these buildings," as well as "don't go to this zone," and "stay in this area!"

As well as when you need to guide large troop deployments or set up daily patrol routes for the town guard, you'll use these Tactics options and drop those way-points in the world.

This will tie into our work on the Jobs Driver that's been ongoing for over a year now.

The Hethinn faction is also getting its logo this month!

We went through many variations before finally settling on one.

Finally, if you haven't been able to tell, Morningstar is an expansive game, and we're going to need to all for reinforcements soon.

We need another coder that can help pick up some of the slack around here while Kent is busy one one major feature, and we need our second team member to programme another related feature so they are both ready to begin iterating on in a timely manner.

Things like our Animation System need to be outsourced to another dev to program that toolset. This is a tool mostly for our artists, especially me, to use to code our animations. Morningstar animations are by themselves trivially easy, but we need a custom tool to encode them, because we are using a highly modder friendly XML keyframe system powered by doTween.

This is our first draft of the tool. We decided this month that this just isn't going to fly. It doesn't meet our needs nor will it suit us in the long run.

So I did a mockup of what a new UI wold look like and the features it will need to have.

Since this is for an outsouce dev to work on, it had to be very well documented.

This is what I'd like our animations to look like.

As much as I enjoy doing these design-phase mockups, I really want to get to work on the actual in-game assets. 

While all of this is totally possible with the tools Unity ships with, we wouldn't be able to mod in new animations with that unless the modder is a unity user and has our source project. So we need a new tool that is portable and can export the keyframe positions and other data as XML. doTween will then play the animation as our FSM (finite state machine) calls a dummy for doTween to play at that event.

We're shopping around for a Unity developer with the talents we need now. I haven't found anyone quite yet, so we'll keep looking in March after the big UI merge is done.

So to sum up:

February -- very productive month!

In March we'll be getting the old website back online (finally) after years of being offline after the last server went down forever.

We'll also have more UI work and begin a big overhaul of our procedurally generated terrain & lighting system.

I hope in April-May we'll have our new guy and can finally start to work on these animations in game, so we can focus on getting moment-to-moment gameplay established. :) At which point, we can start showing off short little in-game videos.