Devlog #6: Under the hood

Hi, and welcome back for another round of juicy updates! Since our previous Devlog, we’ve been hard at work implementing stuff, but for now, there are under the hood improvements we would like to show you.

This Devlog instance will be dedicated mostly to under the hood improvements we’ve been making to the game, including some code refactoring to key game mechanics we would like to share:

Following some code refactoring regarding how item sources work, chests are now fully functional and available in the level. You can now approach them like you would with the flowers, and press Space to pick up their associated item.

We’ve also overhauled the code related to how customers and dialogs are selected and appear in the level. First, we’ve consolidated the 4 different customer scenes we had into one generic customer scene that dynamically loads a customer resource after being selected, this resource contains its texture and other attributes that can then be applied to the customer scene. This also extends to a generic customer dialogue scene, that dynamically chooses and loads a customer request resource, that contains a request dialogue for a customer, and also which potion corresponds to that dialog.

All of this allows us to randomly select a customer type, and then also randomly select which request and potion will be associated with that customer, without ever having to explicitly code those values in our script, and separates the customer from the request itself. All of this while also setting the correct textures for the customer. The logic for deciding if a potion given by a player to the customer is correct or not was also improved, giving points to the player if it was correct.

Note that customers still appear randomly just like before.

For our next devlog, we finally expect to have every ingredient and potion type added to the game, given that chests, flowers, and tools are already implemented and working. One important thing we expect to be able to implement is the ability for potions to apply their effect onto players,  The details on this are still under discussion and further evaluation is needed though. General animations and further code and feature polish is also part of our goal. Besides that, the core game mechanics are already implemented.

We hope to have updates very soon, but until then, Have a nice day 🙂