Hey guys,

It’s just a small update today as I’ve been pretty busy getting Samurai Showdown ready for PlayUp Perth’s September 1st event. I’ll do a  proper write up on what the event was like and the sort of feedback I got, but needless to say, it was a very useful experience for me. Now, without further adieu, let’s talk about the changes I’ve made since my last dev blog.

New Features

Player Input

Thanks to my recent purchase of the Rewired input management tool for Unity I was able to replace the existing system of dealing with player input with a far superior method. While on the surface this has no impact on how players interact with the game, from a development point of view it makes things infinitely easier as I don’t have to bother with Unity’s bare-bones and user unfriendly system of managing inputs. Thanks to Rewired I can easily add support for a variety of controllers which will make porting to different consoles much easier than it would have been.

 

Objectives

Building off of my plans from last month, I’ve since added a UI-based system fo displaying the status and progress of objectives to players of Small Gods. In this, each objective is displayed as a card stored in a list. Each card includes a descriptive name, a bar that fills in as progress is made on the objective, and text saying how much of the objective you’ve completed E.G 0/1000 food. While it’s fairly limited in its implementation as it stands currently, I’m happy with how it works for now though I recognise that I’ll likely need to replace at least some of the code involved in order to let it handle a variety of objective types.

This UI-based system is accessible from the main game menu that’s brought up by pressing the B button on the Xbox360 or Xbox One controller.

 

 

Scenario win/loss events

Building off of the new objective system I have added two new screens to the game. These screens, a win screen and a loss screen, are currently identical to one another but are called for different reasons. The win screen is, obviously, only made active once the player wins the level and the player is, likewise, only transported to the loss screen if they fail the mission in some way.

 

WIP Building models

Last but not least in the list of new additions to Small Gods is the inclusion of new models for several buildings. While currently, the only new models in Small Gods are the ones for small houses, farms, and obelisks, these herald the beginnings of a much prettier game. Though these models are untextured for now, I hope to get some work-in-progress textures on them soon in order to begin experimenting with a proper looking city.

 

Bugs

Controller Movement

While unrelated to the changes in the input system, it’s been noticed that the controlled-based movement system doesn’t always make sense in how it operates. In edge cases, the player will move in unexpected directions that, while annoying, have minor effects on gameplay as players adjust pretty much instinctively. As a minor issue, this won’t be fixed very quickly, but I hope to get it done before release as it’s  very annoying to experience.

 

Terrain flattening:

Rotating a building before placement does not change how the terrain flattening occurs. It’s obvious when you see it but essentially the flattening becomes misplaced so the flattened terrain will not match the building  placement.

Terrain may also be flattened to a point far below the building-site. I’ve not noticed any issues in regards to AI getting confused, but it looks ugly and I’ll need to fix it.

Terrain still doesn’t flatten smoothly. 90-degree walls are pretty common when a building is placed and that really slows down the AI as the movement system seems to determine the speed of the AI by taking into account the angle they’re attempting to climb.

 

Future Plans

Civic Happiness Improvements

As mentioned in the happiness section of the new additions section,  I’m planning to add civic happiness improvements that’ll add a degree of happiness to all AI living and/or working within a certain radius of the improvement. My initial thoughts are to make it so that only the most impressive monument adds happiness and that the happiness doesn’t stack. That way, if there are two monuments within effect range of a worshipper and one applies 10 happiness and the other applies 15, then only 15 happiness will be added to the worshipper.

 

Smooth Terrain Flattening

This is still really important. Outside of making things look prettier, it’ll also make it easier for the AI to navigate the terrain.

 

Final notes

As with last time, there’s a bunch fo work left for me to do to get Small Gods into a properly playable state, but it’s (slowly) getting there. Now, before I go, I just want to let you know that sometime Soon(tm)  I’ll do that writeup on PlayUp Perth I promised you guys. Until then, I’ll see you later.

Bye!