Posted November 15, 2022 by John Poje
I’d posted a bit about the development on the bird-based website a short time after release, but since said website is in the midst of being sabotaged, it’s time to move that stuff over here instead.
also there was going to be both a thermometer and a numeric temperature in the UI i guess? since the thermometer reflects player energy/health rather than actual outside temp, it’s pretty obvious why including the number would only have been confusing
(also, for a brief moment, the interior rooms were randomly generated just like the outside is. that would have been a mess though)
these pics were all from when I was implementing and fine-tuning the ski hill, which took surprisingly little time. they’re just random walks with bias on the sides, that flattens out towards the bottom
also, not in this pic, but i kept putting a certain snow patch in the wrong place accidentally
finally lets talk about the big stuff, the meat and potatoes: generating and saving the overworld forest
it was really obnoxious. unity lets you mutate tilemaps but doesn’t really have a convenient format for saving them arbitrarily
so i have a scene that contains every map in the game, and loads them (and associated sprites) into a bunch of dictionaries
thankfully i finally got around to splitting the regions up into their own prefabs and combining the fragments together when loaded
my saving process wasn’t smart - i just put each big dict into json, which required not only a different json library, but i also had to write custom converters for each type of dictionary since unity’s vector types are dumb
i’m still nervous that the saving system will break
there’s a lot written online about cleverly using multiple octaves of perlin noise to make fine-tuned terrain details, but i quickly discovered that the chunky round shapes of basic perlin noise worked perfectly for making snowy fields
finally, thanks to the person in the inky discord for pointing out that ink story state doesn’t reset on DONE (i guess thanks to the inky dev too). i enjoyed using ink for writing once i got a handle on it, and will probably use it again for narrative stuff in the future
oh! also! the main outside music went through like 9 different versions, all because the climax motif was something i did on a whim in some weird app on my ipad but it kept sounding too shrill and hurting my ears on repeat, so i had to rerecord it without the nice note sliding
i’m still mad about that