Lumbermill is back from the dead (indie devlog)

January the 16th 2023 when I posted the last Dev Vlog 536 days ago I knew I was taking a risk I threw out the old art style and completely changed the game's camera perspective I was hoping to reduce my workload make the art style feel more cohesive and solve some technical problems all at once that was widely regarded as a bad move there are a lot of you sad to see what you'd become so familiar with vanish among other criticism and I'm with you on that looking back I know it was because I personally needed a big change and my enthusiasm for the project was at an all time low what that really meant was I needed to close my Unity editor on lumber mill potentially for the final time so that's what I did I started applying for jobs and got one as a software engineer interior KN in London the studio that made as dusk Falls I learned a huge amount and the new environment did me a lot of good but I had some health problems and decided to leave that job to recover so I found myself with lots of time again after many little experiments and smaller projects over a year and a half since that last Dev vog lumbermill was still there Gathering dust on my SSD and one day I decided to just take another look what I found was a game with huge potential and a really nice atmosphere it was clear a lot of care had been put into it and most importantly I could more clearly understand its flaws and more objectively see where things could be improved and that's where we begin so welcome to the lumbermill devlog for those that are new here lumbermill is a factory Builder and management game I'm building Solo in the unity game engine and for those not so new here see this as the start of season 2 so since last time a lot has changed here's a list of everything let's get into it I started by just playing the game some features felt right and others felt unnecessary convoluted or mixture of both so I went back to the original plan for the games alpha and reprioritized the save system was an absolute must and something I'd foolishly avoided previously next I wanted to tidy the game's core loop I wanted to avoid forcing the player to micromanage and instead let them opt in to features that give them more control that meant removing staff workday rotors and the camps system where staff would be grouped and work together with the camp they live in I'm replacing camps with something else called plots which I'll explain later in the video before making any actual changes to the project I found the moment in time where I started converting the game into top down and reverted every change made since then testing that things seem to mostly be working as they should next I upgraded to a more recent version of unity and began decimating the cruise system removing all the relevant code and filling any gaps there were of course a trillion errors but after a considerable amount of time restructuring I got the game into a much healthier State one of my many small projects in the time since I last worked on lumbermill was an improved developer console that allows me to really easily make new commands for testing the game after adding the console to the project and writing a test command to unlock the entire Tech tree that all seemed to be working next was the save system this pretty much meant pure programming for an entire month so I'll spare the details here but something I've learned with experience is that this should never be left until late until development in most cases it's wise to build your save system alongside your game to kind a long story short lumber mill now has a fully functional Json based save system and from this point on everything I add to the game will hook into it another major problem with the game was that each ground tile was an individual object for a typical Island that could mean almost 2,000 objects in the scene doing absolutely nothing an easy fix for this was to use TI map like I did in the last devlog for both the ground and underground layers I created some ground tiles Unity generat a grid and now the game has less than half the number of objects per scene and can make use of the optimized rendering provided by tile Maps I also discovered that certain parts of the UI were having a huge impact on performance digging deeper I found that the main culprit was the letters UI looking even further into that it was a scroll view which Unity uses to create scroll windows for stuff like text looking at the unity forums it turns out that this is a common problem and disabling the Pixel Perfect setting pretty much just completely eliminates the performance hit there were quite a few of these in the scene it barely affects the visuals but disabling it really made a huge difference so after almost two months of work and mostly changes to the code I'd made huge improvements to the game's performance architecture and stability but a lot of the control over employees was gone and the employee AI had no idea what to do without being assigned to a camp so this is where plots come in first I created a new plot tool for creating and selecting plots I added a new color for anything plot related to the palette and made a first attempt at drawing an icon I attached the new tool to an object in the scene and created a new set of tiles to use for displaying plots in game reusing the ones I made for camps but this time they'll use tile Maps instead of objects ignoring the fact that the icon for plots looks a bit like the underside of a cow I got an autogenerated plot displaying in the scene at the simplest a plot is just an area in the forest which can have staff assigned to it for either planting or felling trees the first thing players will do is create a plot so I started work on the tool for doing just that with the tool active clicking and dragging over an area in the forest creates a plot the plot then has settings for defining how it should behave cave in the growing phase the trees are left to grow in felling Lumberjacks will come in and chop them down in clearing Lumberjacks remove the leftover stumps and in planting arborists come in and plant new saplings these phases can change automatically based on a set of rules or the player can manually switch them if they want that level of control you can assign as many Lumberjacks and arborists to each plot as you want and you can also Link Storage Buildings and therefore entire production lines to the plots too to work with this I've also started converting all of the employee AI to use these visual Behavior trees so that I can test and rearrange things more easily as the AI makes decisions and completes tasks I can see those changes in a graph rather than having to rely on code based tools I've put a link to the plug-in I'm using in the description there's a lot more work to be done on these Behavior trees to get them working with the plot system but for now I've already got Lumberjacks chopping down trees and making trips to storage buildings the final thing I added was debugging arrows to show the links between objects on conveyor belts this isn't something that players will ever see but I think it looks cool and was pretty useful in testing the save system oh and I also rewrote both the splitter and the combiner machines so the items pass through them at the rate they arrive as before they could build up quite a backlog there's more to be done to get plots fully up and running but that's for the next devlog the game feels so much more robust than than it did before and I hope that returning to things with fresh eyes and more experience allows me to make a better game if there's anything you'd like to see in lumbermill let me know in the comments if you want to support Development I've reopened my patreon and lumber mill is of course available for wish listing on Steam if you want to see more consider subscribing and I shall see you here next time thanks for watching

Channel: BWDev

Views: 41,045

Keywords: game dev, indie game dev, bwdev, lumbermill, devlog, indie game devlog, game devlog, game development, unity, unity 2d, unity 3d, indie game, devlog unity, bw dev, factory builder, factory game, lumber mill, management game, management games 2024, factory game 2024, pixel art, c#, isometric game, isometric pixel art, conveyor belt, procedural, procedural generation, island game, islands, pixel art game, made with unity, behaviour trees, AI, artificial intelligence, game AI

Id: q8FZyXaDRX0

Length: 7min 55sec (475 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 05 2024