I started this milestone just wanting one thing: to put a scarf on a pug.
I did it.
Playing with cloth in Unity, and making it performant, took some learning but is easy to get quick at. In Unity, cheap cloth simulation requires that you manually pick a few capsule or sphere colliders for your cloth to collide with. Most of the clothes I made are actually short enough that they don't need to collide with anything. But the dream I had for that scarf on a short pug requires a quick ground test, after which I move a single capsule collider that only the scarf can hit.
More importantly, though:
the scarf fits on the jar.
Each dog has its own offset/scale defaults for each clothing attachment point, as their head and body sizes can vary wildly. Each piece of clothing has its own offset/scale settings that are applied on top of that.
PARTY MENU YEEA-oh not that kinda party
Actually treating this stuff like equipment required adding support for gear. Naturally, this exposed the fact that I'd been happily constructing my exciting new hats-for-dogs feature on top of a tiger pit of not-yet-done stuff:
- I need to have gear alter character stats
- and be able to equip gear in the first place
- and have an inventory for anything that isn't equipped
- and a place to save an inventory
- and a place to save anything at all about the current party
- ... and THEN I'll have the joy of working on all of the UI for that.
I recommend whispering quiet curses before each bullet point to properly simulate my software engineering workflow. Rooting out the true requirements of a milestone's desired progress is always my first step, but the fractal nature of database and UI requirements colliding into this fabulous mess has been... delicious.
Honestly, I was pretty excited for this and working on the UI is a nice payoff. This sort of "party menu" houses the heart and soul of most JRPGs. It's a welcome reminder that I'm actually making a game here. The menu's still a work-in-progress, but equipping works alright so far:
Much of the UI's is based around cascading transitions to go with the "splat" style of interface. It's fun to work on.
Bye!