Another break for real life

Hi everyone,

first some important news.
Luna and I will be taking a break for the next two weeks to fully focus on our university exams.

Thus there won't be a blog entry for this time, even though Andrew will continue his work on the interaction system.

After we have finished our exams we will have a time period where we can spend more time on noria again so I am looking forward to our progress then.

This week there was little change from last week and the changes to the interaction system that Andrew made are still being tested.

Thus I hope you will be patient with us and continue following this blog.

Best wishes

Feliza

WebGL wont work

Hello everyone,

I really wanted you to be able to use WebGl as the new player in the browser to play the game even with chrome or using linux.
This however is impossible, since our free webserver does not support the filesize and I do not believe that we are yet at a point where money should be invested. After all you cant play much yet.

Thus i will try offering a windows and linux version so you can download the game and play it on your computer.

Meanwhile Andrew checked out a new tool to create our maps inside of unity and changed some scripts for better colliders. In addition to that our interaction system is making progress step by step.

Luna is currently testing the new tool. If we decide to use it I will write more about it.

Thanks for your continuous support.

Best wishes

Feliza

Change of plans

Hello everyone,

this week was spent with trying out different things and planning new things again.
As always you can play the updated version here.
Luna added a new map(some collisions dont work though) and partly improved some older maps.

Our new developer Andrew had his hands full trying out raycasts for the interaction system and figuring out how our team and game is structured.

I was busy repairing some code and implementing the feature to determine the player direction once again. Once i finished that i found a great tool to coordinate everyones actions and tasks. For now we decided to try out a program called Trello.

With this program we have many different boards where we can put up cards and in them discuss things or update the status.











During this week it proved very helpful and i believe we will continue working with it in the future.

I believe you remember how we struggled with the automapping feature and some features of tiled.
I still believe that it is a good tool to make simple rpg maps. However we want to be able to adjust the space between a player and objects better and to make better colliders. Thus we are looking into map creation with unity right now.

The consequence of this decision is that it will take a bit until we bring out a new map again and that the map workover we wanted to do will have to wait. So Luna ist currently working on planning out the world map in more detail

As you can see creating a game can often lead to new discoveries, changes of the old plans and improvements born from failure.

I hope you will continue rooting for us and check in once again next week.

Best wishes

Feliza

Hi everyone,

sorry for the late blogpost this time around.

To make up for it i will tell you some great news.
Our team has grown by another member!

We now have an additional developer called Andrew and he will help me with finishing the interaction system faster. He has previous experience with game development and with unity as well and supports us in other areas than developing as well.

As for a new update there will be one next week with a new map for you to explore.
Depending on our progress on the interaction system there might even be new functions concerning the gameplay, but i cant promise that.

This week we were busy planning and testing various stuff. Automapping still isnt working, custom properties arent showing up in unity yet, the maps need a little workover and the interaction system and code recreation are still in work.

Look forward to the update next week.


Thanks for your continuous support.

Best wishes

Feliza

Good evening everyone,

this week we worked on multiple things in order to improve the various methods we are using to do things.

Luna tried getting the automapping feature to work. Due to unknown reasons it isnt working though, even though she checked multiple sources for instructions and followed them. Thus we are currently waiting for the reply of the author of the article which we linked you before.

In addition to that Luna started working on a new map and i hope you are all looking forward to it.
She further explored the feature of custom properties, which we plan on using to identify objects and to save the loot and other things as the properties of the objects itself.

During that time i wanted to implement the raycast. During that process i realised that some parts of my sourcecode disappeared, probably due to playing back a backup... I then decided to implement a new backup solution, so the progress is saved each week after the blogpost.

I will work on recreating the source code which isnt there anymore(detection of the direction and stopping the walking animation when not moving) and update the game after i finish these changes.

Due to our exam period having started in real life Luna and I cant work on Noria as much as want right now, but I sincerly hope that you will stay loyal to us and check back for new updates each week.

Thanks for your continuous support.

Best wishes

Feliza

Good evening everyone,

this week Luna and I worked on testing out the Polygon Collider2d approach which has been described in the link posted in the previous post.

However there are still some technical difficulties, so we haven't really made as much progress as I hoped we would.
Nonetheless we managed to clarify what exactly we need to do to get this approach working.
While Luna will fix the issues with setting the rules next week, I will create a raycast(see my try of jewel miner) in order to detect the collision with the tiles.

The general idea is to have a collider for each group of objects(like stones, trees, etc) and then by using a raycast that will collide with it i will know what it is and can then start the according sourcecode.

I hope to finish the interaction system soon, so you all can enjoy playing Noria even more.

Thanks for your continuous support.

Best wishes

Feliza

Happy new year everyone,

i discovered an interesting article on the site of our program tiled( see here).

In this article there is an explanation of a feature called auto mapping.
With this we can simplify the process of placing colliders on the objects after setting a few rules.
Basically our rules will be like: if there is a tree on the field add a tree collider to it.

In addition to the advantages Luna has when building maps it is also possible to give the different tiles custom properties.

After i change the import script that Tiled2Unity uses the interaction system becomes a lot more simple.
By having different objects and not groups of objects in unity i can acess the custom properties of each object and thus determine what it is and what loot it gives.

Right now Luna and I are getting used to the auto mapping feature and to the script changes.
Using this approach i am sure that we will be able to finish the interaction system a bit faster than planned.

I hope you all look forward to the next game update, since it will bring many changes and follow this blog in the new year 2016.

Thanks for your continuous support.

Best wishes

Feliza