Devlog (Demo Progress Update) (Patreon)

Hey Everyone,

Huge thank-you to all my subscribers.

This will be mostly a Progress update today. I'm not going to take too much time to think bout design work. I want to put all my time into this next demo.

So I've made huge inroads into the demo. These images are of the mostly completed level geometry.

A number of the buildings have interiors and use the new system allowing you enter and exit buildings. I've also added the new character controller mechanisms in and tested to see if I can fall out of the level. You can probably still find places but the new system is much better.

This is the most complex environment I've created yet. This eclipses even the trailer environments in a multitude of ways. Making it even trickier these have to allow the player to wonder around freely. I don't know what the performance implications or other problems players might run into.

Hopefully the demo will be a good test for these systems. 

I've also run into a minor problem in that I need to move to a new version control system. I was using free services but I've blown past their data limits so now I need to create my own repositories. This is a huuuge pain in the arse. I'm going to keep working but I'll hopefully find a place to migrate. This does mean it's unlikely I'll be able to go back to fix any issues in the older demo's.

So the only thing I might mention is the game structure. I'm planning on using this as a good template for a single "cell" location. The idea is that this would represent the rough size of a single area in the game. Using transitional triggers I can load the next "chunk" when you move to the new area.

I don't think I'll be able to make this transition instantaneous. I'll try and do it asynchronously so you can still run around while the next area loads. My current plan is to use little "checkpoints" much like the original pokemon, these will be little rooms that separate each chunk of the game.  

Hopefully this demo will give me an idea on how big I can make the zones so you don't have to spend too much time loading from one area to another.  I'm going to avoid this issue for now and come back to it after the demo is released.

So my next tasks are to fill this environment with characters to talk to and a few things to do. I'll be writing a few branching dialogue tree's and hopefully link some of the interactions into the dialogue system so you can get a better sense of what it might be like to talk and interact with these characters.

After I've got aaaalll that running I'll clean the project for a good build. Thing's are going pretty well so hopefully I'll have more updates later this week!

The next demo's not far off now!