In Vagabond PI, along your journey you will be tasked with rebuilding the city of Elson (or whatever you decide to name it). After acquiring money you will be able to build businesses and residencies. Recently 2 new businesses and 1 residency style have been added to the game.
Coffee Shop
A new business you can build is the Coffee Shop.
Medium and dark roast coffee will greatly heal your energy. Coffee & Creamer will heal energy and a bit of health. You'll also be able to craft Coffee & Creamer at a campfire if you have coffee and milk.
Your House
The most exciting addition is a residency titled "Your House." Your house is essentially what the name says. By building a house you will retain permanent access to certain features.
In example, you no longer have to set up a tent to sleep while in Elson because you now have a bed.
To craft items you will not need to waste wood to make a campfire because you have a fireplace in your house.
2 features to add later on inlclude:
- Radio, determine which song from the game's soundtrack plays when you walk in your house
- Dresser, store items in a place outside of your pockets
Furniture Warehouse
After building your house, a new business will be unlocked to build called "Furniture Warehouse."
At the furniture warehouse you will be able to sell items to craft new furniture. The furniture replaces current furniture you have in place, I do not plan on going full animal crossing and allowing you to move furniture around, keep in pocket, etc. After a piece of furniture has been crafted it is unlocked and can be switched out for free at any time now.
Today we're going to take a little peak beneath the hood of Vagabond PI and see the workings of the engine. The current status of the game is the coded more complex than it has been in the past. Almost the entire game occurs within 1 frame. The world you will be exploring and the building interiors are all within the same frame that currently has 1,228 events. A goal with the game has been to use these events has efficiently as possible through things like fast loops and copy and paste as opposed to cloning objects. After all, sloppy and inefficient coding can slow down a game dramatically.
One of the hardest features of setting up the game has been the "generator" engine, something I would like to show case. Since the game takes place in one frame, there has to be a way for resources to reset over a set period of time since the player cannot simply leave the frame and come back in. My solution was to spam the create object feature. Take a look below:
The yellow objects are invisible active objects that have the job of create specific active objects at set periods of time. The forest area shown in the top looks like this when approached in game:
Here's a quick synopsis of how it works. Trees, crabs and seashells ares super simple. Basically the invisible generator detects if an object is no longer above it, if so it will start a timer. When the timer hits zero it will spawn a new tree/seashell/crab if the player is in a different section of the map.
Wildlife like deer and snakes are a little more complex.
Because these active objects move, they have to be given an ID. When generated, they receive an ID tag in its alterable values based on the X and Y of the generator that created them. As long as a deer exist with an ID tag that coordinates with the X and Y of its generator it will not create more deer. When the deer is harvested it will start the timer on that generator. This creates an endless supply of wildlife from what is only 2 objects.
Hopefully I didn't bore you guys with this tech talk, but I'm very happy with the coding that is going into this project. Until next time, happy gaming!
Sorry the lack of posting, but some great progress has been made on the games engine. Also the user interface graphics have been improved
Resident AI
First and foremost, the resident AI has been created. As you build the town of Elson (or whatever you decide to call it) you will add residents to your town at random. Residents will maintain a "happiness meter" found directly above their head when talking to them. When the meter is full you will receive a unique item as a gift from that resident. Whenever you have a unique conversation with them it will add 5 points to their happiness. Unique conversations can only be had every 2.5 minutes.
The best way to add to this is by fulfilling the requests of your residents. Fulfilling a requests will add 20 points to their happiness and they will give you a random item in return. Requested items will appear above resident's heads.
I will be reusing much of the resident AI from a previous project called Motherworld that gave them pretty detailed paths to follow throughout the day.
Trees
Acquiring lumber will be essential part to the experience. Lumber will be needed to build fires for crafting and cooking. It can also be used to repair structures throughout Kudzu Province. Currently there are 4 types of trees with plans to add one more variety.
Left to Right: Palm, Ash, Birch, and Evergreen.
After cutting down a tree with your axe you can harvest the lumber that is left behind.
Until next time! Hopefully next update can discuss those pesky baddies you'll find roaming the swamps.
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