Adding Hunting and Foraging to my Pixel Art Game - Chef RPG Devlog #5

hey noah here welcome to another chef rpg devlog i got a ton of cool progress to show in this video including a brand new hunting and gathering system and introducing some of the characters that will be in the game before i jump in i wanted to make the announcement that chef rbg will be coming to kickstarter i think i will do the official kickstarter launch around early november and i would really love it if you are interested in supporting the game all of the funds will of course go towards chef rpg's development and allow me to work on the game full time the funding will also be used to bring on additional help to create beautiful art music characters and make a bigger game world i'll make sure there will be a lot of cool backer rewards available to make it worthwhile so if you're interested hit the notify me on launch button to get notified when the kickstarter goes live i actually commissioned an anime artist known as buggy to do this amazing cover art my favorite part is this beef wellington here if you zoom in you can even see the juiciness of the beef it makes me hungry just looking at this drawing the two characters also look amazing and are meant to represent your default player characters in the game there's a lone building here in the background which is something i will talk about in a future video i'll leave it as a mystery for now buggy is part of a group of anime artists called nekotama anime they specialize in characters and they do both personal and commercial commissions i'll put the link to the site below if you want to check them out as shown in the cover art one of the main activities in this game is gathering ingredients for your restaurant this means that there'll be a lot of different tools you can use for hunting and foraging before i started setting up tools i wanted to update the main ui of the game besides the art style change i changed it so that there's a special slot for equipping tools to actually use the tool you have to right click it in game to wield it this way you can always have a tool ready but you can still do other activities without the tool getting in the way another system i began to develop is the skill tree i decided to make this early to mostly give myself a sense of scope of different activities that will be in the game this skill system is inspired by my favorite flash game of all time sunny 2 which is a popular game from the armor games era sunny 2 is a turn-based rpg similar to older final fantasy games where you fight monsters with a team that you customize unfortunately i can't play it anymore due to flash being discontinued so i can only show you some screenshots the skill tree in this game offers you a variety of different abilities that you can mix and match to create your own unique build giving this linear game a lot of replayability i want to implement a similar system in chef rpg offering three different specializations with abilities that you can mix and match the three directions that you can focus on in this game are cooking gathering and social there are also some endurance focused skills and random skills thrown in to give you more options to customize your character some of these abilities give boosts to certain activities while others unlock new parts of the game so here for example once you reach a certain gathering level and have enough skill points you can unlock this skill that unlocks the ability to go into underwater areas this one here requires both cooking and gathering proficiencies and unlocks greenhouse farming so you can grow some fruit and vegetables to use in your restaurant and one final one i'll show under the social abilities you unlock marketing here so you can create advertisements to attract more customers i want to design a system where you could decide to specialize in one skill direction or kind of become a jack of all trades by mixing and matching basically you can choose to play the entire game without doing any gathering and solely rely on relationships and friendships to develop your restaurant or you could only do hunter and gathering to impress your customers with those rare ingredients that you found so let's jump into the hunting system i jumped right into the tool that i thought would be the hardest to animate which is the bow i immediately hit a pretty big roadblock the issue with animating a bow with top down pixel art is that i need to allow for 360 degree rotation of the bow without using splines the legs should be able to move freely without affecting the direction that your bow is pointing this also creates a big animation problem normally when my character walks forward he is also facing forward so everything works but what if i'm pointing my bow to the left but walking towards the right the torso would need to face one direction and the legs would be walking the other direction after a lot of testing i came up with a solution by splitting up the player's body and legs this way the body can rotate in any direction while the legs can keep moving in a different direction in the case where the body is pointing left and the legs are moving right i just instead reverse the leg animation so that the character is backpedaling instead of having a 180 degree twist on the body like some sort of scary abomination for this part i had to brush up on some of my high school trigonometry and calculate which combination of bow direction plus movement direction would result in which animation after a pretty long process i finally arrived at a system that i think works pretty well the upper body spins freely and when you point past a certain angle the legs automatically reverse and back pedal when the character is idle the legs automatically change direction to avoid that 180 degree twist on the body probably needs a bit more refinement but overall i'm pretty happy with this animation system now is the time to implement a huntable animal i decided to make a boar since it would be an aggressive animal that can fight back and i really want to test that system out i used the a-star pathfinding system from the restaurant and modified the script to fit with the exterior on the exterior i made the grid smaller so the movement is more flexible the same pathfinding script was applied to the random npcs so now they can roam around the map and give it more life i also added a script that allows them to follow the paths whenever possible so they aren't randomly straying into the woods on the other hand the boar is scripted to avoid the pathways which will make the game more immersive here's a quick look at what the boar's animation sprite sheet looks like after adding some colliders and giving the boar a health bar a basic hunting system is ready for chef rpg i want to create a slower paced hunting system where you have to play methodically and try to get as close to the animal as possible without alerting it i created this aiming system where you have to hit the exact spot where the animal is standing instead of having the arrow hitting everything along its path which i think makes it too easy i created this arrow crosshair where when you hold down the mouse the crosshair starts to focus until it reaches its limit where you get maximum shot power and accuracy the further you are away from the target the larger this focus area is and the less accurate you become i'll definitely continue to develop this hunting system further maybe eventually adding in melee weapons and traps so you can be creative and tactical about how you approach the hunt i gave the board several states if you approach it it will become alerted and start running away on the other hand if you attack it it becomes aggressive and starts chasing you if it hits your player character you will take some damage after its health dips below a certain point it will start running away and potentially run outside the map so you'll have to hunt it down quickly or else it could escape forever maybe in the future i'll allow you to continue chasing it across multiple scenes which might be interesting next is the foraging system i started with making a sugar cane plant when hit all of the stalks will rotate tilting away from where you're hitting it now we need a tool to harvest the sugar king i was considering several tools like a machete a sickle or a scythe i decided to start with a scythe since it seemed like a pretty good general purpose harvesting tool the animation for this was much simpler and i created some swinging animations with an arc which gives the player a better idea of where to hitbox is i'm still not super happy with the idle animation when wielding the scythe especially when looking at it from the side let me know if you have any suggestions for this but for now let's test it out on the sugarcane plant once i slash the sugarcane several times the plant pops and we get some sugarcanes also notice here that i added falling leaves when hitting the plants i did this using unity's particle system it just takes a while to tweak all the particle system settings and after that you just add in the leaf sprite that you made and you get some nice falling leaves then i can pretty much apply this to any plan i want by tweaking the settings a little bit and swapping out a different sprite i still have the issue where some leaves render behind the character because you can't change the sorting order of the individual particles i'll have to find a solution for this later since i think it looks better if more leaves are falling in front of the character than behind after the sugar cane is done i added mushrooms wild lettuce a hot pepper bush and some fruit bushes for now i put these plants in this garden here it's kind of cool to run through the bushes and see all the leaves fly out for these berry bushes i thought it would be strange if you have to use a scythe to harvest them since in real life you can just go up to them and pick them with your hands so for some of these plants i added an extra feature where you can just walk up and as long as no tool is equipped you can simply grab the ingredients and they pop out this is the same system used in stardew valley for picking your harvest which i thought gave off a really cool feeling when your crops drop to the ground finally i recently brought on a talented artist to help me with characters characters are one of my weaknesses because i'm not very good at drawing them and i'm also not very good at creating character stories beyond anything generic so i'm super happy that someone with more experience and passion in that department is helping we won't be able to properly implement the characters until a large portion of the game is complete since they would have daily schedules and quests that involve different parts of the game world but i'll give you a quick look at some of the characters we have and our first iteration of the character ui they will all wear unique clothing as well which helps to distinguish them but for a new player i think the green arrow will be essential if i go up to a character a chat box appears above their head and we can begin chatting the menu is still a work in progress but we hope to create a lot of different ways to interact with an npc inspired by the relationship system from the sims games if i click talk a chat menu pops up and you can see this awesome character art hazel is one of my favorite characters and i'm really excited for when we can properly implement her into the game and here's a quick look at a couple of the other characters we got alois a shrimp boat deckhand that dreams of becoming a captain one day and over here is uriel who runs the butcher shop so that's the progress so far next up i'm going to be redoing a lot of the art in the main town and the interiors to bring the older art up to the same standard as always feel free to post any feedback or ideas the feedback has really helped me improve the game a lot over the past couple months i won't be able to implement everything mostly due to time constraints but i'll try to incorporate as many improvements as i can and it's always nice to hear what you guys think of the game so yeah that's about it got more cool stuff coming in a few weeks but for now thanks for watching and see you next time

Channel: Pixel Architect

Views: 25,428

Keywords: Pixel Art, Stardew Valley, Indiegame, Gamedev, Devlog, Kickstarter, Animal Crossing, Chef, Cooking Game, Open World, Chef RPG

Id: 6oZpu0y4Qa4

Length: 11min 14sec (674 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 25 2021