Devlog 0

I have decided to take the game I built in a game jam and finish it into a “real game”. I think this will be a great learning experience and a fun project to work on. There is a lot to do though. The game is lacking in balance, content, and many basic quality of life features. Who needs a minimap anyways, am I right? If you wish to try out the original game you can download the zip attachment.

The plan

I am giving myself a bit over 3 months to finish the game. This should be long enough to get a lot done but also short enough to keep me motivated. I plan on writing a short update every two weeks to reflect on everything I’ve done so we can all see how the game is progressing. I will also be releasing a working version of the game every two weeks to gather as much feedback as possible.

Progress so far

I started a new Unity project in order to keep everything as clean as possible. I have already begun migrating scripts and systems from the original game jam project but cleaning the hacks along the way. I will remake all of the art assets since most of the original ones were very rushed and many of them are not even in the correct perspective. 

I set up a bitbucket git repository. I found this link very useful since setting up everything has been a pain in the past: https://thoughtbot.com/blog/how-to-git-with-unity 

I spent a few hours researching a very weird issue where the tile map I created was flickering from time to time. I finally found out that if you have tiles touching each other on the sprite sheet, colors from neighboring sprites can leak while the game is rendering and you get flicker and grid showing for a moment.

This one flickers:

And this one does not:

I find it super annoying to configure sprites after importing them to Unity so I wrote a short editor script that sets values to the ones I want. It will only apply these rules to the sprites imported in the sprites folder. This folder can be anywhere in the Assets. If you decide to use this script, make sure you put it into the Assets/Editor folder!

It will set:

• type to Sprite
• pixels per unit to 16
• filter mode to (point) no filter
• compression to None

using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using UnityEngine;
using UnityEditor;
public class SpriteProcessor : AssetPostprocessor
{
    
    private bool isInSpritesDirectory() {
        string lowerCaseAssetPath = assetPath.ToLower();
        return lowerCaseAssetPath.IndexOf("/sprites/") != -1;
    }
    
    void OnPreprocessTexture()
    {
        if (isInSpritesDirectory())
        {
            TextureImporter textureImporter = (TextureImporter)assetImporter;
            textureImporter.textureType = TextureImporterType.Sprite;
            
            textureImporter.spritePixelsPerUnit = 16;
           
            textureImporter.filterMode = FilterMode.Point;
            
            textureImporter.textureCompression = TextureImporterCompression.Uncompressed;
            Debug.Log("Successfully imported sprite and set default properties");
        }
    }
}

Next steps

In the next two weeks I will focus on setting up a project, creating basic tilemaps and sprites, adding a minimap and setting up a control schema. I also plan on refactoring wood gathering and enemy / obstacle damage dealing.

Merry Christmas everyone!