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:
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 🤩)