Welcome to Friday Fun, the blog where I poke my head up from underground, let you all know I’m still alive, and hopefully entertain you with some bits about my project progress and game development experience.
On A Roll
This week saw progress on two major gameplay features: Trash collection and vermin removal. So far I have been focusing on the rodent vermin, creating traps that can be placed to capture mice and rats. Once a capture has been made, the vermin can be safely carried to the new treelawn area that now serves as a huge “outbox” for the house.
This dovetailed nicely into enhancing trash collection. Full bags of trash must be placed in the treelawn area, and any full bags in that area are removed by daily trash pickup.
When testing this out, I discovered a moment of delight that I cannot take credit for having planned, unless I planned it subconsciously from these elements:
1. The landscape for the first Dehoarder game was remarkably flat. Quite literally, it was so flat that it was remarked on in a let’s play video of the game. So I made a point of adding some significant hills to the terrain for Dehoarder 2.
2. The treelawn area is, as is common in modern neighborhood design, at the lowest elevation for the entire property.
3. Full trash bags have spherical colliders.
The result of the interplay of these three elements is that you can toss bags of trash out the front door, and they will satisfyingly roll to where they need to be!
I think it will stay like this. It’s too much fun.
As for the trash collection itself, that is supported very nicely by my Lua modding system. Just a simple script allows me to collect bagged trash from any defined pickup zone:
What this does is it loops through all objects (targets) that are tagged with the “PickupArea” category, and for each of those, loops through all targets that have entered the volume defined by the PickupArea’s receiving volume (which in our case is a box collider covering the treelawn area of the property). For each of those target items, it checks to see whether the item is tagged with the “BaggedTrash” category, and if it is, the script gets rid of the item with a sparkly flourish and then waits half a second before checking the next item for dramatic effect.
My (Not My Best) Presentation On Adding Lua to a Unity Project
Last Saturday, I shared my experience integrating Lua with Unity with the Central Ohio Gamedev Group during our monthly meetup. I’m not much of a public speaker, so any time I’m in front of an audience I’m out of my comfort zone. I still think I need some practice with presenting.
Back Catalog Releases Complete
Deific’s Guide, Dirty Fork, and Werepenguin’s Escape all made their back catalog debut on itch.io this week, completing my back catalog release campaign for now. I had considered shutting down my presence on Kongregate entirely, but doing so would remove one avenue by which my games could be found. It would also remove my ratings history for these games; looking back, I think 3.52/5 stars on Kongregate is realistically quite a good rating for EARL’s Warehouse considering my level of gamedev experience at the time. Dehoarder’s 3.42 is also quite respectable considering it was written in a weekend.
If you really have a wild hair to play the Unity Web Player versions of any of my old games, they are all now preserved with my explicit consent in BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint project.
Until Next Time
I take my leave to go ponder insects and insect control within the Dehoarder 2 game. I want to do more than just carbon-copy what I’ve done with the mice and rats. Indeed, it would be quite silly to have a trap for each individual insect. Ultimately, if the underlying mess is not cleaned up, the vermin return. Maybe I’ll have insect control play more from/into that somehow…