The Rise of Dagon: Week of 6/28 Update

This update encompasses the weeks of 6/28 and 6/21 due to the previous week I skipped my update because my day job required overtime work.  We shipped a major version release and I had to work extra to help ship the release -- including the full weekend!

I did get a few small things done during that previous week but felt it would be better to combine that smaller amount of work in with this weeks update for a nicer full update.

So the first thing I did was work on Substance related textures for the level design aspect of the game.

I was able figure out run-time controls for the Substance textures! This is a super cool feature where  in the level editor you can change the appearance of the level's textures depending on the parameters I expose in the substance designer.

Things like the color, the specular level, the tiling of the x/y of the texture, or even more interesting effects like the 'dirt' level of the texture.

In this short video I am demoing a toggle button of the dirt level of the texture; toggling between a 'clean' texture and a 'dirty' texture as one potential parameter as well as the new dialogue system (discussed further below).

So what's super cool about this is that the textures in the game can have a lot more variety to them than you might otherwise get in a game with very little additional design time needed.

Next update item is the level format logic was created this week.

This is a first pass and things will definitely change over time but in this screenshot we have a sample of  the level objects in both their physical and logic attached within the prefab object that is created at runtime:

In the screenshot you'll see the prefab is expanded and I've clicked on the "northWallLogic" object inside the prefab.  Farther to the right is the current boolean logic that I've decided to start with.

This is the initial prototype items that seemed to make sense to me; but I reserve the right to add or remove items as needed!

You won't actually need to worry about this when your doing a level -- you place a wall down and the logic will be attached to the wall.

Finally for work done in this update we have the new dialogue system!

Initially I planned on doing a very simple hard coded quest dialogue for the prototype -- it is a prototype after all however I was able to pick up the  "Dialogue System" for Unity asset on sale; so i figured I would go ahead and give that a try for the prototype.

After exploring its features a bit I'm actually pretty impressed and have myself wondering if this might actually be robust enough to use for the full game.

So here we have a quick screenshot showing off a dialogue that I mapped out using the Dialogue System:

As you can see in the shot the Dialogue System supports a graph system for mapping out the conversations.. it also actually supports another style of editing a conversation called "Outline" mode but I don't find that quite as intuitive myself.   I should also mention that this Dialogue System also supports a lot of 3rd party external dialogue systems -- but those require additional learning curves and expenses so I don't see myself using those at this point -- but it could be a nice reason to use it if you were already bought in to one of those external systems.

So the final screenshot is a placeholder NPC model where I was testing out the conversation that you see mapped above.

This is demoed in the video earlier in the post as well if you want to see it in action!

Thanks for reading, see you next time!