Designing a Marine Biologist's Inventory for my 2D RPG

[Music] hey everyone welcome back to another dev vlog for Dalton it's currently 5:45 a.m. on Monday May 11th just got back from a few beautiful days spent with my family for Mother's Day and I'm ready to get back to work and forge ahead with some progress on the next milestone but before I do that while I was home over the past few days I made some tweaks to combat and planned a few more changes based on your feedback from the last video so let's take a quick look at that first the first thing you'll notice here is just how different the corruption now looks on the enemies it used to be kind of a light blue and green meant to look like some kind of colourful corruption but ultimately I think it looked more tropical and that's not really what I'm going for now these guys are a really dark purple with some red hues and you'll also see a little bit of a particle effect making it look like this corruption is kind of seeping off of them as they move around I don't know about you guys but I think this is an enormous visual improvement so I'm curious to hear what you think next up I think I finally solved the issue of how to show the corruption level of each individual enemy you guys know I've been through a couple iterations of this with both a health bar and a corruption bar but now I think I finally got a solution that I'm happy with you see if I attack one of these guys here now instead of having a bar up here at all they're just gonna change to a lighter color as you continue attacking these guys they will eventually turn completely bright their original sprite color showing that they're healthy and no longer corrupted the corruption particle effect disappears and of course they're no longer aggressive and can no longer be attacked I think this is honestly a really good compromise we can see that the corruption is melting away as the color changes but we're not introducing any ugly UI elements that are gonna clutter the screen if we have a ton of enemies at any one stage in the game I just don't want to have a bunch of these health bars floating over ahead I think that'll take away from the aesthetic that I'm going for so I'm really happy with this compromise curious to hear what you guys think too looking at the week ahead I still have three small tweaks I want to make to the combat system before changing gears and working on the inventory and some new UI systems specifically I want to take some ideas that you guys gave me from the last video I want to show a grow meaning when the enemies become aggressive towards you have some little indicator for that I want to tweak the primary and secondary attacks a little bit just to try and see if it makes sense to change some properties for each of those and finally I want to add an effect to drop the loot to make it bob up and down so that it's easier for the player to identify so there's the plan unfortunately it is after 6 a.m. now I've been talking too long so I'm gonna go ahead and buckle down and get to work I'm guessing all this stuff will take me longer than just this morning so we'll go ahead and catch up whenever I've got it all wrapped up [Music] hey everyone welcome back to Wednesday morning it's bright and early just before 6 a.m. and at this point I feel like I finished up my small backlog of tasks that mostly just consisted of enhancements and improvements to combat I don't want to walk through everything so there's a lot of stuff that I changed behind the scenes but I'll show you some of the cooler stuff one of the main things I worked on yesterday was the way the enemies become aggressive towards the player now previously you had to just get close to an enemy and it would become aggressive towards you and ultimately just be aggressive towards you until you defeated it well now there's two ways for the enemies to become aggressive of course you can get close to it or you can hit it with an attack at which point it will show a little exclamation point over its head start to chase you around and his particle system will also turn red to show that he's kind of angry at you in addition to this once you get far enough away from an aggressive enemy you'll notice that the particle system turns back to black and the enemy is no longer aggressive so this just gives you a way to escape from enemies if you've entered a conflict that you don't want to really take part in next up I've made some performance enhancements to the way I'm showing these numbers above the enemies heads previously I was using an animator to animate these in and out and change their scale values but now due to your feedback I am using tweening which I understand is supposed to be much more performance so I definitely appreciate that suggestion in terms of the way that this text actually shows on the screen I have now implemented object pooling what this means is that instead of instantiating these text objects and destroying them on the fly when I'm done with them I spawn a whole bunch of these text objects up front when the crab spawns and I keep those in a queue such that when I want to show one of them I can DQ it call set active true let it do whatever kind of tweening it needs to do for the animation and then call set active false and I no longer want to see it this means less calls to instantiate and destroy and overall is a more performance solution that's also flexible to other things besides just these text objects I'm really glad I spent a few days making those enhancements I think the enemies just look and perform a whole lot better and I'm also happy that my little backlog of tech debt here on Trello is much smaller that said you'll see that my combat milestone has now disappeared at least for now it may still come back but it's now time to work on the meat and potatoes of this devlog which is creating an inventory you I something I've never done before so let's hope that practice has a tutorial [Music] [Music] hey everyone welcome back it's going on 7 a.m. on Wednesday May 20th and it's certainly been a while since I gave an update this past week it's admittedly been something of a challenge for me after making some initial progress on a very basic inventory system I feel like I've kind of hit a creative block she's not quite sure how I want these item pickups and this inventory system to work for item pickups I've been trying to decide if the player should have to manually pick up items or if they should just scoop up every piece of loot they run across the former is better for managing inventory space while the latter helps keep a much smoother gameplay pace for the inventory system I'm stuck between a large inventory with tons of space that the player doesn't need to worry too much about or a smaller inventory that requires some micromanagement if you want to head out to an island and try to slay a boss I thought way too long and hard about all this before doing what I should have done all along talk to sigh what gear he actually brings into the field when he's going out to capture specimens or perform research after a brief chat I'm very excited about what we came up with the plan for now is to have the players inventory broken into three parts the first will be a buoyancy compensator vest which will hold tools and whatever weapon the player may have equipped next will be a mesh collection bag which will have a finite number of slots for stacking crafting materials which will include things like the crab shells that I've already implemented finally the player will have a few specimen jars each with room for one specimen captured during the mission I really like this design so far it's unique at least somewhat realistic and combines the quality of life and micromanagement features that I initially wanted players can still stockpile crafting materials without worrying about the collection bag space but we'll definitely have to carefully consider which tools to bring on each outing with limited space on the BC vest now it's time to actually build this thing and as you can see right here I have quite a long way to go with that this is what I've accomplished in the past week just a really rudimentary system for collecting items that drop on the ground I've got the inventory in the bottom right corner here which you can toggle with tab and once you run over one of these loot items that's dropped by the crab it disappears off of the ground and appears in the inventory this works really well and thankfully should be pretty flexible so I'm hoping I can use this is the building block for building out the three pieces of the inventory that we just talked about it's after seven o'clock now time to feed noodles and the shrimp and hopefully make a little bit of progress on this stuff before I really have to go to work I'm thinking it'll take a couple days to build out anything meaningful here so hopefully it will catch up sometime before the weekend [Music] hey everyone back on Thursday morning with a quick update on the inventory it's about 6:45 right now and as you can see I've made some pretty good progress on laying things out what we're looking at here is my inventory prefab which is meant to be the child of a canvas inside this prefab I have four main panels the first these panels is the player panel here and that's going to show an image of the player and ultimately reflect whatever gear the player is wearing this image will be updated of course when you equip new gear and right now this is just a placeholder I haven't made any of that functionality yet to the left of the player we have the collection bag which is going to be a larger inventory of smaller items meant to just hold stackable crafting items on the bottom right we have these specimen jars which will just be one or two jars that are meant to house one or two specimens that the player captures during an outing and above that we have the buoyancy compensator which is meant to hold larger tools and weapons here's how the inventory looks dropped into the main player interface and the player interface is meant to be a game object attached to the player that he can toggle and that will have things like the inventory a map logbook field notes basically anything that the player may want access to at any given point now right now this is just floating off to the right side of the interface but I kind of think it would be cool if the player themselves could rearrange this stuff so I haven't coded that yet but I think I've made this modular enough that that might be possible in the future and finally here's how it looks in the game if you press tab you'll toggle that player interface which right now just has a semi opaque black background and you see the inventory over here on the right now if I go ahead and go down here and fight some of these corrupted crabs and pick up some shells we should see that I've picked that up in the collection bag I still have a lot of coding to do for this which I'm gonna work on next but I think this is pretty great progress it looks pretty neat and really lays the foundation for me to build out my idea of having these three inventory systems in Dolphin alright I'm back at 7:45 this morning with a big update on loot and how it interacts with the new inventory system as you can see here we're in a scene we have defeated all the corrupted crabs and I have an empty inventory we see two types of drops on the ground the familiar crafting components that we're used to and I just realized I need to change the color for those but we also have the weapon that we're wielding I added this back as a loot item because these are two different types of items we want them to be sorted in different places in the inventory the weapons should go in the BC vest here in the top right and the crafting components should go in the collection bag on the left so we'll go ahead and give that a try if we move over the stick and open up the inventory we'll see that it got sorted correctly into this part I'd still need to fix the aspect ratios but you get the idea now if I go pick up all these guys we'll see that's not working there we go to pick up all these guys we see that those got sorted into the collection bag and of course I haven't implemented stacking yet so these all occupy different slots but that's okay I got this basic sorting working and I'm pretty happy with how this is looking so far the process of sorting different loot items into the correct spaces in the inventory is actually not too hard to achieve the loot just has to have some notion of where it's actually supposed to go to do that I'm using a scriptable object on my lootable items to track that data among other things so we'll go ahead and open up the one for my sand crab shell fragment the top right here you can see the type of data associated with each loot item we have the item itself which is the game object that's meant to be spawned when the loot is generated a name for the item a rarity and of course the inventory type which I'm using to sort you see collection bag is what I have selected here for the sand crab shell fragment we have the sprite that we want to actually render in the inventory and the max stack size of this item in the bag picking up the items themselves does not require too much code either from the player controller you can see here I've got a function called detect loot which I'm calling in the physics update and here we're just using an overlap circle to check if we're close to any items that have the loot layer now once we detect one of those we pass it down to pick up item where we pass in our loot from there we have a reference to the scriptable object that knows what type of inventory it's supposed to be sorted into and then I can just switch over that and add this item to the correct inventory to which I already have references I think this architecture is ultimately pretty flexible it allows me to take any game object and turn it into a loot item that can be dropped on the ground picked up and sorted into the correct place in the inventory now of course from the UI perspective none of this looks very good so far but that's something I'll definitely be improving in the future all right it's after 8 o'clock now definitely time for me to get ready for work but I'm super stoked with the progress this morning that was like three hours of pure focus on that inventory system and I'm super happy about that I'm gonna sign off for now hopefully I'll have time to revisit this again before the dev vlog gets posted this weekend Bowl see we'll catch up then [Music] hey everyone I'm back on this beautiful Friday afternoon with one final update for this dev vlog and it's a pretty exciting one before work this morning I went heads down for about three hours to do everything I could to improve the aesthetic of this inventory UI that involved creating a separate piece of pixel art for each of the four panels I have in my inventory system and then importing those into unity to get those to size and scale correctly behind each of my inventory items I don't know why but I just felt like I could not end this devlog with my inventory UI looking like a bunch of boring rectangles so let's take a look at how my work this morning turned out so here we are in game and this is the finished product and I should say finished for now I'm sure I'll be reworking a lot of this in the future but as you can see we've got a much more colorful and unique looking inventory going now that we did before starting from left to right we have our collection bag which is really just posed to be kind of a drawstring bag with a clip on top that holds a bunch of crafting items so you can see we have a lot of slots in here and each of those will hold stackable crafting materials in the middle we have our player panel which is really just a nice little wooden looking background to provide some nice contrast for the player model next up we have the buoyancy compensator vest which again is meant to hold tools and weapons so we only have a couple of slots there and we wrap things up in the bottom right with these collection jars or specimen jars for collecting live animals now I realize of course there's still plenty of room for improvement here I know that I can improve all of these sprites and right now the way this is laid out I kind of have some different sized pixels which I know I'm supposed to avoid but for right now I think this is so much better than those gray rectangles we had before and I'm honestly really excited about how this is looking with those enhancements wrapped up and the inventory looking pretty darn good for my first attempt I think I'm ready to call it quits on this dev vlog and go enjoy some time outside as always thank you guys so much for watching I hope you enjoyed this episode and I'm getting really excited about getting close to a hundred thousand subscribers so thank you guys so much for your support if you're joining the videos and you haven't subscribed already please consider doing so and of course I'll see you in the next video

Channel: DevDuck

Views: 78,919

Keywords: indie game dev, game dev, indie game devlog, 2d unity, unity rpg, devlog, dauphin, devduck, unity inventory, unity inventory system

Id: jJiFCKrx6Qk

Length: 15min 53sec (953 seconds)

Published: Sat May 23 2020