Game Development So Far
I skipped a game development update last week so that I could continue to focus on the building functionality. Three weeks later and I’m really pleased with the progress!
After setting out the underlying tiling system I started working on how I would use the tiles to handle the walls, equipment etc. The solution was to use the parenting that Unity provides to allocate walls, equipment etc to a specific tile.
Unity Parenting
To explain a little bit more. Each tile is created at runtime as a gameobject. They’re pretty empty gameobjects so therefore don’t impact on processing too much. With a gameobject for each tile it is possible to make other gameobjects children of the tile gameobject. Walls, equipment etc are all gameobjects themselves. Therefore, whenever I need to allocate, for example, a wall to a tile I can do so by parenting it to the required tile. This then makes it’s really easy to handle positioning and accessing any objects “on” a tile.
This worked great for all objects created during runtime. However, there are a number of objects that are created before the game is run and therefore before the tiling system loads up. This caused a problem because none of these objects were parented to a tile, meaning they couldn’t be destroyed or manipulated as part of the building functionality.
To solve this issue I ended up introducing a function which sweeps over the game world on load up and finds out the location of each environment object. Using that location it can then figure out which tile it needs to belong to and then parents it to that tile. This works really well and doesn’t slow down the load up time at all.
With those changes completed the building functionality is complete for this first iteration. The visuals of the whole building system still need updating as they look quite unfinished right now. But the hard part is done.
Game Development Milestone
This is quite a milestone for me as the building functionality is such a big part of tycoon management games. I was actually concerned about how difficult implementing it would be but it turns out it wasn’t too bad.
I actually have one of my friends over at Fallen Flag Games, Francesco, to thank. When I was chatting to him over at EGX this year, we were discussing some of the difficulties I was facing in development due to the 3D nature of Gym Empire. He said to me, why don’t I just tackle the problems in 2D. More often than not design problems in 3D games are actually 2D one. Most of the activity happens in a 2D plane. It’s just that the characters and environment is 3D. The 3D is more of a visual aspect. I took this approach with the tiling system and it made it a much easier challenge to deal with.
Other Developments
Alongside the building functionality development, I also got round to posting an update on Indie DB. It’s been a couple of months since the last update and there have been quite a few improvements to discuss.
I’m not sure my timing of the article was best though. I’ve played around with releasing articles at different times of the week. This one I released on Friday afternoon. My hope was that the weekend is quieter with news updates on Indie DB, therefore the article will stay on the front page longer. This happened to be the case with the post staying front page until Monday morning. However, the quiet nature of the weekend extended to the traffic too. I got a similar amount of views as I do normally, but I didn’t make it into the top 5 popular games list. Only getting as high as 11. I think this is down to the spread out nature of the traffic over the weekend, as opposed to the more focused traffic early to mid-week. From now on I think I’ll stick to early week updates when I’m posting to Indie DB as getting into the top 5 really helps the visibility of Gym Empire.
Time Management
With the building functionality complete I can now move on to some of the other areas of development. Things are looking good for a demo release before Christmas if progress continues at the same pace!
- Environment Features – add in environment and item objects like doors, windows, water machines, posters etc
- Mechanics – start defining the underlying mechanics and algorithms. This will enable decisions for the UI to be made easier
Gym Empire is now available to add to your Steam Wishlist.
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