Jul 05 - Animals and Upgrades (Alpha 12)

At a glance

Added Chickotoos, Paratoos, and Chikys. Which are similar but legally distinct from Chickens, Roosters, and Chicks. And allllllll the functionality that entails.

Added material effects for tools. Hammer, Watering can, and axe effectiveness is based on metal, and all tool stamina use is based on the material. So an aluminum tool may not be as strong, but will be lighter and easier to use.

Added basic speech bubbles for survival stats

Made beds a bit better

Tier0 buckets are now wood

I'll be talking about some reward tier stuff this week cause it's relevant, so let's address all the other stuff first. Tools now have more effects based on their material. A tool's durability, effect, and stamina cost are all based on the metal used to make them, and each metal has different stats. Sort of a basic run for now, but you're able to tinker with what metals you use based on the tool and how you want it to function. Also the speech bubbles from the first game that remind you when you're hungry and such have returned, they'll be getting fleshed out more in the future.

OK, so reward tiers. Specifically, the big one. The custom feature. Thus far there have been two to purchase it, and they just happened to relate to the same thing (albeit with different focuses): animals. Most of the reward tiers are based on crowdfunding, eg I make a pie and each of you get a piece of it when it's done. The 3 top rewards (item, model, feature) are the only ones where you're directly buying my time. Item and model have some restrictions on them (in that you're restricted to an item or a model) to make sure I'm not working 30 hours for $100, but for the feature you're directly hiring a programmer to make a thing for you. Usually that's done by businesses, and usually they want me to make them a database or generate a report. This is a unique scenario in which the clients want to be able to name and hug their animals and give them hats.

Buying the feature tier isn't *just* buying coding time (Coming next update: Accounts Payable table, once crafted allows you to view client projects and generate reports) it also comes with game design consulting to help make it fun. Though most have been happy just to give me their idea and let me run with it. Anyway, this is a roundabout way of saying that there's going to be a fair amount of focus on animals, though I may need to spend some time on other features (like equipment) before returning (for hats).

I've talked a bit already about how animals forage for food and their needs, but now that there's a build with it available I can go into some specifics. All animals have their basic needs like hunger in order to keep living, but there are also quality of life needs (which correlate directly with quality of produce). They need socialization, freedom to explore, a place to keep dry, and a feeling of safety. In the first game if animals were angry with their care they'd stop producing, this time around they'll produce if their basic needs are met (which they will also try to take care of themselves), but the quality of their produce will depend on their quality of care.

There are two kinds of quality: Daily mood and overall caretaking. Animals will "level up" into higher tiers of produce if their care is good, but the day to day quality of their produce will also be affected by their mood that day. That means that in order to consistently produce the best milk, you can't just take care of your animals until they're maxed and then dump them in a cage. That said, a lot of players found the daily requirements of feed/brush/talk to be tedious, so animals are a lot more autonomous now. You'll still be able to brush, talk, and (now) hug them but instead of being a necessary part of their care it will instead provide bonuses for their mood that day, and not be necessary to maintain high quality produce. Sort of an optional thing that you get rewarded for if you want to spend some time with your animals.

When I was working on the AI to have animals forage and eat I had a pen with a hen and rooster (since I was also working on reproduction). The hen laid an egg, and then the rooster walked over and ate it. So I learned I needed to code in anti-cannibalistic tendencies.

The animals aren't 100% done yet, there's some missing animations and funky behavior, but I want to stick to weekly updates. Also, presumably, alpha players are ok with this. So rather than another update without animals I've put them in but made them hard to get. There's a random chance of having an npc try to sell you a fertilized egg.

Oh yes, animations. Here's a bit of a view of the production pipeline for animations, and why they tend to get put off. First, you get a model. That's usually Stacey's job and she's talked a bit before about her process (I think). Then she'll rig it up with joints and bones, that involves placing a bone inside the model, and linking it to a number of faces and vertices it's meant to control. The bones are all linked together to create an animation skeleton. I then come in and start making animations. Fun fact: Well, personal history fact that's exhorbitantly more fun to me and dreadfully boring to everyone else: before becoming a programmer I almost went into animation, so I have a bit of a background with it. Wow!

I'm more of a 2D animator, but 3D has been pretty easy to pick up. You move your individual bones around and create keyframes, much like you would do with rigging in 2D. Only, rigging looks terrible in 2D and pretty nice in 3D. Here's some in progress low-framerate-because-the-program-I-use-cuts-them-out-presumably-for-smaller-filesizes animations I've been working on for the chickens:

For the player and human animations I want to maybe use mocap since there will be a lot of different animations that need to be combined together, like "hold a torch" + "running" + "swing sword." I plan to look into that around the time I work on combat so I can hopefully start chipping away at those placeholder player animations.

I had to reconfigure, make new hitboxes, and reimport every model in the game because of how Unity and Blender interact. I had been using workarounds to get them all oriented properly, but they were starting to pile up and conflict with each other. Blender and Unity have weird interactions when it comes to materials, rotation, and animations. Both sides have very eloquent arguments as to why this is, but the bottom line is that it's a pain to deal with. Here's an example of how I needed to get the chicken oriented in blender in order to have it properly positioned in unity:

Here's a list of the animals I'm currently working on: Chicken, cow, sheep, dog, cat, pig, goat, bunny, horse, raptor, emu

Oh yeah and happy belated Canada Day and America Day! I watched fireworks from my balcony. Thus ensuring my necessary patriotism levels for another year.

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