Hello everyone!
Stefano here with the 19th Project_BuildTutto Update! This has been a good week of polishing and old code tweaking to improve the general feel of the game and I'm really happy for the results!
Devlog timelapses has been finally upgraded with music and small captions to better tell to the viewers what they are watching, and I'm very happy with this result too!
Smooth Guy's movements
The first thing that can be noticed when playing now, is that the guys now feel way smoother than ever before. That's because before this update the guy's sprite was drew on the exact X and Y coordinate of the guy object, and since he is moving linearly in a grid, it felt a lot stiff and rigid.
Now I added a small little piece of code to keep the precise grid coordinates to manage all the logical stuff and use a new set of coordinates to draw the sprite. This new set of coordinates are calculated by a simple constrain that gives the player a feel of acceleration, deceleration, and smooth angles when turning.
gif but I have to keep the gif size low for these articles :(
Windows's animations
Changes are noticeable when opening and closing a menu too since they now have new little scaleAndFadeIn and scaleAndFadeOut animations. Those are still pretty simple and I'd like to improve them in the future, but give me a nice starting point to work with.
Item selling workflow completed
Last week I shown how the player can set automated crafting orders to craft a certain amount of item and mark them as a stack of items to be sold, but without actually selling it because the functionality was not implemented yet. Now that code is here and the player can effectively earn money by selling items!
This is another step into the direction of having the core gameplay up and running, so I'm very happy with this milestone.
Improvement to storing algorithm
I think that is now 3 weeks in a row that I keep improving this piece of code. When someone plays a game like this, even if he is a developer, he doesn't often think how many variables the developer has to keep in mind when planning something as "simple" as a storing management algorithm. It's really a mess, but now I think that I'm in a good position with it and it *may* be done for the time being.
Right now, the system can cycle between all the resource object not stored inside of something and recognize if they need to be stored or not. If They need to be stored it will look for a storage item not full and that can take that item type, but the system will prioritize nearest chests that already have that item type inside them to merge those two stacks, and it will also prioritize chests that will result full after inserting that stack of items to further optimize the space occupied by the storage. The “GetAStorageForThisItem” function can then return one or more chests, in this second case the guy will have to grab all the stack of item and split it into multiple chests in order to satisfy all the priority conditions.
Keep in touch
If you are curious to see how things will go feel free click any of these links to join our community:
Discord Server: Discord.gg
YouTube channel for Timelapses: Youtube.com
Twitter: Twitter.com
Changelog: Docs.google.com
