Things have moved faster than I wrote about, I need to better balance developing and dev-logging! On the other hand, this prototype is still very much unplayable, so there's isn't that much to show.

What changed since the last post:

  • citizen navigation was improved and now leverages collision avoidance, so that citizen don't run through each other.
  • I split the debug panel into tabs, made it live-resizable and added a few QOL improvements.
  • lots of behavior tree work:
    • citizen now construct a building before acquiring it
    • working in a building consists of fulfilling the jobs it gives, like:
    • generating resources in exchange for playing an animation
    • bringing resources from the building to a stockpiling location like a granary or a warehouse
  • a notification bubble system, to show temporary text/icons popup above models, as a way to communicate with the player until I've got some animations for citizens
  • citizens have been suited with a high level daily activities logic, built as a hierarchical state machine:
    • wake up
    • find work and work all morning
    • eat
    • go have fun in the afternoon
    • go back home and rest

This is pretty close to how they actually lived!

I built a few models for buildings:

  • farm. I used a prebuilt asset, which I don't hate but don't like alot.
  • market
  • granary
  • tavern. For those last 3 I assembled primitives from a few different asset kits, using Asset Forge. I am pretty happy with the ROI given how terrible I usually am at design and how much fun I had with these:
missing
Tarvern
missing
Market
missing
Granary. You can tell I was getting tired of modeling at this point.

I explored new tools to work more efficiently:

  • I had a setup of filebrowser in order to edit design files from both my computer or my phone, but the text editor didn't meet my expectations (bad UX on android).
  • I replaced this setup with filestash, which has a better UX, but the text editor is somewhat very limited (no support for non-emacs or vim shortcuts, ie no copy-paste, and support from devs seems very minimal).
  • I setup a local planka instance in order to keep track of work. It does the Kanban job very well.
  • I recently discovered logsec which seems like a great open source local replacement for Notion:
    • markdown saved as markdown files - easy way out
    • built-in drawings with excalidraw
    • web editor (for local files)
    • possible to run as a local app and add plugins to it (mermaid 🤩)

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