videochess

hey what month is it

Added 2016-09-30 03:20:11 +0000 UTC

wELCOME BACK
so, first of all: ive been way too quiet these past few months and im really sorry!! my productivity sank into Nothing for a while and when i did get stuff done, i was so embarrassed by how little it felt like i'd worked that i didnt feel like it was worth posting about. it's a real easy hole to fall into. but!!! that's a bad way to run a patreon and a Great way to lose people's interest and faith. SO, IM HERE WITH, SOME STUFF!!!! im in a work&health upswing so there's lots to talk about this time. lets dig into my gif folder and see what's changed..

THE FALL OF THE GAMEPAD-CENTRIC CONTROL SCHEME
this was a pretty big breakthrough point. so, until a couple weeks ago, i had a really big problem: My Video Game Felt Like Crap To Play. it was a big uh-oh realization. i had a lot of the basic features working: you could walk around, lift and place furniture, mess w/the ground level in your zone. i'd gotten the elevator set up and you could talk to npcs. i was starting on menus. a lot of the most frequent player interactions were in, but they... didnt... feel good!! not only did they not feel good, they were Heck to code. this hit me especially hard when i started constructing the various menus. it was just, a crap mess. a real mess of craps.

the elevator in its current state. it works! i have to remake it though

i had an epiphany one night, though, and that epiphany was: Why Did I Design Any Of This The Way I Did? the simple answer to this for a lot of mechanics was "animal crossing." animal crossing is played on a gamepad and it works for that game and my game is kinda like that game so naturally i jumped to the conclusion that My Game Should Work Like That Game. but that's a super reductive way of thinking!! i didn't consider why animal crossing controls the way it does, and whether it'd actually suit the kind of game i'm making. and hey, heres the answer: it frickin doesnt!!

a basic npc interaction, with a classic friend

so, long story short, i moved to a keyboard-and-mouse style setup. and, right away, everything started to click. i was gettin real excited. everything felt more intuitive to play and interact with via the mouse than on a gamepad. it was also way more intuitive to create!!

early mouse tests for furniture movement!

i'd like to design a gamepad control scheme eventually but if im being honest keyboard & mouse suits zone much better. it's a fairly casual quick-to-pick-up-and-put-down pc game with the target demographic of Anybody. not having to own or hook up a gamepad is a huge boost to accessibility i think.

fun having

anyway! the way zone controls now is: you move the character with the keyboard and interact with stuff via the mouse. it feels good imo and i hope youll think so too.

fine rotation with rightclick and 45 degree rotation with keys!

BEGINNING OF MENU
menus!!! 100% of my experience designing menus (NOT A LOT, TO BE FAIR) has been for gamepad controls and it's Heck. after moving to mouse interaction everything suddenly got very fun instead.

here's what the early gamepad "furniture menu" was lookin like. its real bad.

i decided early on that i wanted to have a combination of 2d and 3d assets in my ui. however, i learned pretty quick that unity's default gui stuff only really deals with 2d - so i hacked together a goofy system where all my 3d menu stuff is actually physically in the world, just hiding out in the void. there's a fun little rod that follows the mouse around the menu plane and bumps into 3d ui elements to activate them. for all i know, this is how every game does it.

the patented Bumpy Rod system in action

something im having a lot of fun with is making ui elements fun to just kinda play with and watch, while also making the animations etc quick enough so they don't get in the way of actual menu navigation. a spinning button animation is cute but after playing for a few hours the only thing the player might remember about the button is how frickin long it takes for the menu to pop up thanks to that animation. i'm still feelin' this stuff out as i go along.

the furniture menu now! it's lookin pretty good, imo.

the furniture menu is pretty much done. you can sort by category, do a search, flip through pages if there's a ton of stuff in a category, etc. i still gotta put a lil "fav" button in there so you can add things to a favorites category though!

the scrolling background is thanks to a shader which makes a mesh into a mask for a scrolling texture, which my twitter pal john guerra (@johndaguerra) put together for me. thanks john!!

MORE THINKIN ABOUT LIMITS
even after shifting to a mouse-and-keyboard focus, i still had a few mechanics that didn't feel quite right. for instance, i still had it in my head that there'd be a "pickup radius" around your character, and you'd have to move close enough to an object to pick it up, and then have a similar "put-down radius" where you couldnt put stuff down too far away from you.

jelly prison

it felt bad!!! but i was like... theres gotta be limits, right. i mean, if people could just pick stuff up from across the room, itd look weird right!!! and it would. but then i realized there's a perfect in-fiction reason for players to be able to do this... and went ahead and implemented it. it feels better and now you can lift and place stuff from any distance, moving your character freely while doing so.

hunble beginnis...

LORE... AND MORE!!!!! ACTUALLY THIS PARTS JUST ABOUT LORE

i talked a little bit about it in my original zone intro post, but there's gonna be quite a bit of lore in zone. the tone is pretty lighthearted, and there's not gonna be like, a storyline, but... i'm the kind of person who loves magic systems and worldbuilding, so there's gonna be some of that.

a real summoner.

a big focus of the game is "Mist." mist is a free-flowing energy within the zones. it's also, naturally, what you make your furniture out of. each tenant in Zone Sweet Zone has a Mist Phial that holds their personal mist reserve. as players grow in power, the capacity of their Mist Phial also grows. there are some basic spells that tenants living in a zone need to know: "EVOKE," "SHIFT," and "REVOKE."

"EVOKE" is the power to call on the mists to grant a personal material desire. every player has access to the entire catalogue of furniture in the game, and naturally they aren't carrying all that stuff around with them physically. when you wanna put a chair down in your zone, you don't pull it out of your pocket. you clear your mind and picture the chair you want to see in your world... and if it's within your power, the mists will answer your call.

"SHIFT" is the power to relocate objects formed from mist. there's not much else to it. it's a pretty handy spell to have.

"REVOKE" is the power to return an object to the mists. when you do this, your Mist Phial is refilled with whatever the cost of that furniture item was. no diminishing returns: mist isn't a currency, just a resource.

these are very basic spells. oddly enough, anyone who moves into a zone seems to intuit the method for casting them without a second thought, so don't worry - you won't have to do any studying or leveling up to cast these bad boys!!!

I MADE A LOGIN SYSTEM
i got a secure login system set up. this isn't particularly exciting but it's another Hefty Step i won't have to worry about later!!!!

HEY SO WHATS LEFT, AND WHEN CAN WE MOVE IN
thats a good freakin question!!! i've got a to-do list of stuff that Absolutely Has to be done before i can let people log in and play, and its still pretty hefty. i lost a few months to Health and im back on track, but im just one person and my ability to gauge how long stuff will take is??? turning out to be very bad. BUT IM, WORKIN oN IT,
i definitely jumped the gun saying that id be able to launch the game in july (WHAT WAS I THINKING) but ive been tracking everyone's pledges all the same, so you'll all have the levels you should rightfully have when move-in month finally arrives. it'll be playable before the end of this year for Absolute Sure at the pace im working now, but like... hooh!!! I DONT KNOW WHEN... hopefully after this next month ill be able to give a better estimate??
the nice thing w/the structure of zone is that i can continue to tweak and fix and create content past the initial release, but like... i guess im just very nervous about that ol Early Acess problem of letting people play before a thing's in an actual playable state!!! SO, IDK, IM GONNA, just keep doing my best and keep y'all posted. i wanna make a thing that's good from the very start and just keeps getting better.

thank you everyone for your patience and support!! i can only imagine my silence has been worrying at least and frustrating at worst. but im here and zone is here and we will both continue to grow in power in the coming months. im gonna try to do better on the updates and communication front!!