General Update

General Update

Overview

Hi, in this dev log I’m going to go over a few features I’ve added or made progress on—like animations, UI elements, and some menus and scenes.

Animation

For animation, I’ve made a decent amount of progress since the last dev log. This time, I’ve got all four movement directions working, though I still need to tweak the speed of a few animations. I still can’t get video uploads working on Itch, so I can’t show them in action yet, but below is the current blend tree I’ve set up for the player, along with the parameters I'm using:

As you can see, all the animations are connected to each other, so the player can switch between any of them depending on what parameters are met. There are four parameters that aren’t related to movement—these will be used for other mechanics or events, like watering plants or destroying destructible objects.

They're all Boolean parameters. For example, “isMoving” just checks whether the player is pressing any movement input—if false, it plays the idle animation. “direction.x” and “direction.y” are pretty simple—they check if the player is moving left/right or up/down based on whether the value is greater or less than 0.1, and they trigger the appropriate movement animations.

UI Element

This UI element is a simple overlay that highlights the cell directly in front of the player on the tilemap. The reason for this feature is to make it clearer what the player can interact with, without needing a pop-up prompt. I decided the player should only be able to affect the tile they’re standing on or the one directly in front of them.

Later, I might update it so the player can interact with any of the four tiles next to them, and in that case, the highlight would move based on mouse direction—for example, if the mouse is more to the left, then the left tile would be highlighted.

Menus and Scenes

For menus, I’ve added two transition scenes. One is for day-to-night, where it’ll show stats like how many plants were harvested or planted, and then it transitions to the night scene. The second is the opposite night-to-day and shows night gameplay stats like kills or damage taken. below is a image for the day-to-night scene, the night-to-day scene looks basically the same layout with the night filter on it and change in text to fit the context.

I also made a night scene, which is basically a copy of the day scene but with a darker filter to make it feel like night time. This way, I don’t need separate assets for both times of day.

Notes
I’ve mostly finished the fighting mechanic, but I haven’t done much with it lately because I’ve been focused on building out the daytime game loop.

As you probably guessed from what I’ve said, I’m currently working on getting the main loop for the daytime gameplay finished. This includes completing the player animation system, adding in planting mechanics, and making sure the game transitions to night correctly and saves the data from the day.