Shops!

Long-ish time, no see! I am almost done with university, one quarter left! And since the last time I posted, I got a job as a software developer! Busy, busy.

Well, it's my "spring break" right now, and due to COVID-19, I've been inside. So I had some time to work on Ponyland, and shops are functioning in a basic sense!

 

Those piles of coins on the ground are my "shops," heh. The shopkeepers are Sweetberry Medley and Lavender Lilac.

Some goals I have since I've implemented this:

• Have each shop keep a stock of items that varies. Neopets did this; there is a random stock of items in their shop, the quantity of of each item varies, and therefore shops can sell out of items. I think this might be a cool concept because it means that the economy can vary, and indeed on Neopets, there were people who "restocked" items as a way of earning money and getting rare items. I wonder if I could set stock to "-1" for items that want to keep infinitely stocked, like some essentials or something. 
• Make it so when you buy an item, have some coin particles appear near the buy button.
• If you can't afford an item, maybe grey out and disable the buy button (but there's a check in place right now that won't let you buy something you can't afford anyways).  

Hmm, besides that, I'm not sure. I think saving the pony's appearance is still a thing to work on. And creating consumables to modify their appearance.

I could also work on Stella's interior, but that'd involve a lot of artwork.

I could try starting on networking, since I just finished a networking class at university. We made a poker game as our final project, and the class has helped me better understand how network architecture should work. Networking is still a really big topic to tackle, so I keep pushing it off.

It's been a while since I looked at my code, I'm thinking a good thing to do would be some code cleanup, and adding lots of comments, since the code-base is getting big.

Random ponies

Just messing around and made a random pony generator. On rare occasions, the Penny Tail gets weird and swaps the hair and hair2 materials... no idea why. Weird.

    

Manes, tails, and colors. Oh my! (And third year retrospect)

Hooray. I got the manes and tails in the game! There was a bit of a nightmare figuring out how to put the manes/tails onto the model correctly. Turns out I need to actually write a script that sets the bones of the hair objects as children of the bones of the pony rig. So weird. You'd think there'd be something to do that automatically, but no. Hmm...

I also made a temporary button that allows me to swap these pre-made ponies in and out to show some different ponies! With hair! And tails!

So, not as much has been done this year as had last year. I was mainly focused on university. University is fun, but it can be fairly stressful.

However, I think I crossed some things off the list, and kind of half-did some things.

I did add in the manes and tails, added the blink, started working on shops (got the Shop Editor working and a basic UI for shops, just need to finish it up in Unity), I got the inventory to save, and I am starting to figure out how to change player colors (but haven't saved them yet).

My next goal will be figuring out an Effects/Consumables type of system that will allow me to have objects that can change your colors. And also save your pony appearance.

Blink blink

Don't you blink, you might miss it.

Long time, no post. Sad to not have worked on Ponyland much at all. Was either busy with other things or just tired. But hey, I got the pony to blink! Now her eyes can be properly moisturized.

Out of curiosity, I wanted to see what things that belong on the ground, like ponds and pathways, would look like. Out of laziness, I made a very crude pond drawing with my laptop trackpad and reused the crafting interface's "Craft!" button as a "wooden walkway." Viola!

Hopefully that perspective stuff doesn't look too weird.

Working on Shop UI

Rough WIP. What do I do with that empty space in the top right? Eeeeeeh, who knows.

I'd like to make the items sit on little shelves. I figure a tooltip hover will show the name of the item and its gold price.

Got the shops data into Ponyland in Unity (just involves updating the PonylandData.dll and importing the shops.xml), got the basic code for it in place. I just need to work on implementing them properly. Ugly test UI time, here I come!