Bug Game Devlog #04

What’s up, Bug Folks? It’s time for another Bug Game Devlog. Don’t forget to smash that like button and waffle stomp the bell. Do you think I sound like I’m down with the youth? Good, let’s talk about crafting.

What changed

I’ve added a toon shader. You know, like in the old Legend of Zelda, Wind Waker? It gives the game this cel-shaded effect, just an extra bit of stylistic polish to make my janky 3D models look a bit nicer. I assumed that a toon shader would effectively be a filter, but it turns out it’s on a per-material basis.

I’ve finally paid some proper attention to the lure mechanic. The old loop was “pick up thing > put down thing”, easy to build, boring to play. So, I’ve approached it from scratch and realised that having a basic crafting system in place is going to mature the gameplay loop. I’ll get into this in more detail in the deep dive, because there’s a lot to discuss.

And, as I built the new lure and crafting system, I started to realise that the early UIs that I was using were no longer working for me. So, I rebuilt all of the UIs from scratch, in Photoshop, and made them much simpler. There’s still a little skeumorphism there, but not nearly as much, and everything is way less distracting now.

Deep Dive – Crafting Systems

Why did I add crafting?

Right, let’s look at my crafting system. I made a start last week on adding to the item/lure system and realised pretty quickly that it kind of sucked. So instead of building on old ideas, I approached it from the ground up and thought about what gameplay loop would encourage players to move around the garden itself. Having multiple ingredients before the player can use a lure grants the need for players to go back and forth looking for specific items, and it also enables players to shape the gameplay they’re looking for.

I’ve also done some hefty work on the UI, as explained above. Everything looks much prettier now, and should be more intuitive. The crafting UI was particularly interesting to me, as it required a bit of planning about how players would interact with buttons. These UI changes led me to begin to think about player visual language, and I’ve settled on using a nice, serene blue as a hint that a world item can be interacted with. I’m starting to form this vague pile of personal design rules – “If it’s blue, you can touch it.”

What I’m doing next

So, as it stands, I have the core gameplay loop now in place. I need to pad it out a lot more, and I need to connect the new lure system to the quest system, plus actually add functionality to the lure effects, but the skeleton is definitely there, which is very exciting! Before going through and polishing everything up, I really need to make sure that the rest of the secondary gameplay elements are in place, namely, BugSpeak.

I also need to do the animation framework, finally, and no doubt I’ll give some more TLC to the items as I go.

Oh, and something to note now – the tutorial needs to change quite substantially, and I need to plot out how the player unlocks things in the early game. But I’ve learnt my lesson – don’t build the tutorial before you’ve made the game.