[Hello!]

My name is Demiqas and this is the first of hopefully many devlogs about my journey in making a Role Playing Game about being a Traveling Merchant. You will buy goods in one town, and travel to others to sell them for profit. You will then spend that money on things that will fulfill yourself, be it making it easier and quicker to make MORE money or on cosmetics and even a house. Its a simple enough concept, one inspired by things such as Spice and Wolf, Ascendance of a Bookworm, and the laid back experiences of Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley, and Animal Crossing. Its something that I hope people can enjoy in a relaxing way.

[THE PROJECT]

This project, which I am tentatively calling "Merchantry Meadows", officially began on May 21st, 2023 and as of writing this devlog, has been in development for roughly 14 days. For an engine, I chose Unreal Engine 5 for the many features and scalability that it has. One key feature which will be integral to the success of this project is Unreal's Blueprint visual scripting system. Historically, I have struggled with programming the traditional way, as I find it difficult to understand the flow of things with lines of code. Due to the visual nature of the node-and-wire system, its quite easy for me to work around and allows me to make things I wouldn't be able to before. This is a hobby I have been trying to tackle on and off since 2012 to little success. However, I never fully gave up and kept tackling this head on and learned piece by piece over time. I now have full confidence that I can see this through game to completion. To give an estimation of completion at this point would certainly be foolish.

[The First Two Weeks]

Firstly, I decided I wanted to learn Unreal's new Enhanced Input System and implement this into the project. If in the future I have the opportunity to launch on consoles, this would certainly be a massive boon as the system is very flexible. My first day or two was spent wrapping my head around this system, before I was able to get a simple movement system implemented. Then the camera system was implemented the same way. Being able to move and look around, that's a whole genre of games in itself, isn't it? Guess we can just wrap this one up and call it, right? 

Obviously not, we have ambitions to achieve!

The only game I have managed to make before without following alongside some helpful tutorial was a barebones clone of Cookie Clicker. Once I felt like I had learned all I could from that and only had busy work remaining, I chose to shelf that and start on something else. With a game of this sort of scale, there's a lot more challenges and plenty to learn. So, NPC interaction was something I began to implement. In this early build, the NPCs are simply blue spheres with a capsule collider to detect when the player is within range. Accomplishing this also taught me about Blueprint Interfaces. These make interactions between different blueprint actors a breeze, as you simply need to implement the interface's function to communicate between the various actors you add it to. This is so much simpler than the CastTo that I was utilizing for everything in the past. Then it was a matter of utilizing this to test out some basic buying and selling functionality. Everything went pretty smoothly. If this doesn't seem like a lot to accomplish in 14 days, I blame the fact that Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom released in this time frame and has been an absolute joy to play. But I finally beat it so now there is more time for the important things.

[Wrapping Up and What Lies Ahead]

Now that I have implemented what I feel are the basics, its time to add more structure to the game. First will be a proper inventory system. I'm going to implement it as a blueprint component that I can easily attach to any actor that will be buying or selling goods. Then ill start adding the UI functionality with it.

Also, shout out to some amazing youtubers who have put out fantastic tutorials on a wide variety of Unreal Engine content, such as Gorka Games, Ryan Laley, PrismaticaDev, and Cobra Code. And for more general content such as games and 3D modeling, much love to Royal Skies. 

I look forward to sharing this journey as the game progresses. I wont be setting a solid schedule for these devlogs, as it feels as if that would suck the fun out of doing them. Plus, not all progress is visual so it can be hard to share stuff that's fun and exciting.

Until next time, folks!

-Demiqas