TBC Log 6/2/2024

I am currently sitting in a cafe near my home in Chicago and trying to kill time… so here we are! Something to kill time with that isn’t Balatro… writing a dev log!

For the better part of the last month I was in a bit of creative sprawl. I continued what I do, continued development, but for some reason it became very difficult to be inspired to work.

Only in the last week have I started really being proud of my work in the last month. I’ve been setting up duels, moving the animal AI i made to UE5’s native AI system (which is “faster” I’ve heard?), and working on the beginning of clans warring with one another.

In relation to war: somehow, way back, I actually have implemented a “clan relations” system, that depends on the Ardents’ and Soothsayers’ behaviours. You can make your Ardent engage in clan relations positively or negatively. This is what the Ardents are doing when they’re in the center of the map. According to the relationship system, all the Ardents see one another as co-workers and have a higher friend number with one another than with other members of other clans, who mainly start out as strangers. So I haven’t completely designed out what takes the negative clan relationship to war status, other than it has to get really low. I have a functional debug of the first part of the war system: pressing the keyboard key “Y” is the developer tool, two random clans get picked to war with one another, a menu appears about which animals are listed as “conscripted” or not, there must be three creatures on each side of the war for it to go through. In my head I have this like, capture-the-flag-esque kind of game play out, additionally working with the rock-paper-scissors animal type interactions, along with each creatures’ stats being used for different parts of war (so far its mainly gumption that’ll be used? still need to design this out more). Well, here’s the part I’m actually really excited that I figured out on my way while developing the war system: the player can click on an object in the map and move it around on the terrain, at the terrain’s corresponding height. It like snaps to it! This means so much, I can make city-building games with “ease” now, at least its special for cities built on non-flat land. I was having trouble making this work for the past few months… all the tutorials i followed on line like, halfway did it, but it was always really messy and buggy. So like last Wednesday evening, when I was calling with my friend Veronica (she was helping me figure out some music references for Isaac), i was passively working on this system while we were both looking stuff up and while I was writing an email, and while doing that I found a tutorial for what I was doing that ended up looking perfect and very relevant. The catch is that the tutorial was completely in Italian, so I had to soldier through almost incomprehensible auto-generated auto-translated youtube subtitles, I made it through I think because of my “extensive” UE5 knowledge, so I could just copy what he was doing and hope for the best. It sort of reminds me of that one time I tried to stream myself playing CK3 in french.

In relation to duels, I don’t quite have as much to say about them as I do war. I got some “combat design” from a college friend, as I was asking him how to make a duel as dramatic as possible. He recommended that after the two creatures are circling round one another, they both make their relative animal noise and then start running at one another. I was getting this to work, but an important part of the “duel” for me was for all the Ardents to be present before the running would start. I was having issues with the “AIMoveTo” node and the leader of the Crocodiles not… fitting? or something like, then being unable to pathfind to the spot I signified, which makes no sense because the Croc Ardent has no trouble moving to its “Ardent Behaviour” spot in the middle of the map. So I was confused. I am hoping that moving to the native AI system will help me clean out the AI behaviour. I’m so psyched about this AI partially because of how easily my homebrew AI was able to be un-plugged without ruining the game. But yeah, thankfully not really a problem for me!

All in all, its been nice to have a month where I wasn’t traveling like crazy all the time. So I could actually settle into my routine and make good progress. I was a bit un-inspired for a bit, but this motivated me to schedule a feedback meeting from an old mentor. Anyway, that’s the log for May!