The Gruen Effect - Progress Devlog 6

This was easily the heaviest and most change-intensive week of development. It saw the addition of NPCs to the game, the full implementation of enemies, a functional game loop, and a slew of new graphical changes.

The creation of new graphics wasn't a process that required revisions or had major speedbumps other than the time it takes to create them, unlike coding and other aspects of game design that I have less experience in. It was simply a case of drawing new elements in the style I had laid out, and animating them in the Unity engine. The major new things visually are that the player has (kind of) animated movement for every direction, enemies have grown out of their placeholder graphics, and there are now UI elements. There is also a title and gameover screen.

By far the most complicated feature this week was the addition of NPCs in the Customers. I made them simple sketchy figures, in keeping with the aesthetics and visual coding of the game so far (important entities like the player, enemies, and item shelves are cleanly outlined in black and have high contrasting colours, whereas less important items like regular shelves, the floor, and customers have sketchy, vaguer outlines and less distinct colouring). Thanks to this I could make the graphics for them quite simple, and they didn't take much time at all. Similarly, making them animate as they get pushed around was also quite straightforward.

The problems I encountered were all when getting them to move. I wanted to have it so that they would randomly move up or down a little bit every few seconds, as though they were peacefully browsing the aisle they were in. I made a coroutine (a special kind of function in Unity) because they allow for time delay to be implemented very easily. In the end, after several smaller of those annoying smaller issues that look bad but have really obvious solutions- including the employees existing at -2000 on the Z axis (i.e. behind the camera) for some reason and me capitalising a single word in their code that meant they didn't animate, I had cute little NPCs that could be pushed around helplessly. >:D

The final thing I added this week were several UI elements to assist with keeping track of various gameplay elements. The paycheck and score displays were simple enough, but the biggest one was the button displays that showed if the user had an item equipped to that button or not. These were also relatively straightforward, it was just a case of writing a piece of code to assign one of a set of images to that UI element depending on code I had already written that managed the player's inventory.