Weekly devlog #4 - Tutorial explained

Hi folks! Kirthos here. Welcome back to the Rebellion's news. Today's DevLog will be a bit technical.

Gabeux: We had planned a detailed tutorial to be added in the far future, but after the feedback coming from our early supporters - Colony-sim veterans and newcomers alike - we decided to shift gears and do something about it, fast. I'll leave you with Kirthos to tell you all about it.

Tutorial

For people who had read our last devlog, Gabeux showed a screenshot with the WIP tutorial. 

I have been working on the tutorial for 1 week. We still have many ideas about how to improve it, but it's a start. And it will be added in the next content update. We believe it's a good quick help and introduction for everyone new to TAR, especially for players that just discovered the genre.

How does it work?

I was discussing with a friend and he told me he was using Unity animator to make a scenario. I thought it was an interesting idea so I decided to try to do that for our tutorial.

I've made a tutorial manager class where I've added an animator component on the game object.

Our actual animator for the tutorial, expect changes before release

Each state has a script attached to it, so it has code that runs when the animator starts or ends a state and each state can hold the data it needs.

The state creates an "alert" to show the task you have to do in the top right corner of the screen. You can click on them to get more info about how to do the asked tasks.

Now, after some code written in the manager to make the animator progress in the state, everything works.

For saving, I save what state we are doing in the manager and the data needed for the current state. Actually, our tutorial doesn't use any animation but since we already have an animator it will be very easy to add animations later. 

We are still testing if it works as we want, but for "quest events" with multiple choices it can be very interesting to use the same system. It would be a lot more visual to code events and see what each choice does.

More Flora & Farm info - Gabeux

Just some feature spoilers for your delight.. :) 

• More music and sound is coming with the update, adding a bit more ambience and common sense (such as the ambience in caves being different than on the surface, as well as night ambience). There's a couple more things coming to the sound systems for this update, hopefully.
• We've been calling the update as Flora & Farm, as you'll be able to get seeds and replant any plants in the game (after some research), and the update will also include 4 new farm crops (3 food, 1 utility).
• As of now, there's a bit over 65 new items for this update - spread among plants (and seeds), resources, crafted items, crafting tables, and so on, as well as new research projects.
• There will be updates to the balancing regarding food and certain crafting recipes, as well as an added feature or two to the crafting system.
• Quality-of-life UI improvement coming when opening the Storage menu through a crafting table (let us know of any suggestion and feedback you may have in regards to the UI, in particular!).

You can always find info regarding our current and future developments on our Rough Roadmap board on Trello!

Holidays and 2020

As we are working a lot on the next update as well as dealing with the holidays season, we don't have a lot of time available to make the weekly devlog, and won't be making one next week - so we'll catch up with you again in 2 weeks.
In time, have a great time on the end-of-year holidays, do enjoy the New Year's Eve and please, have an awesome 2020. Thank you for following and supporting us on this journey. And remember: if you are a Rebel in the eyes of the corrupt, you're doing it right.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below, and thank you for reading!