Village of Boobs. Month 2

Previous post: https://subscribestar.adult/posts/2233486
Video: https://youtu.be/wZ1CA87fDwg
That 12th again, and it’s time to talk about what was done this month cycle.
Most of this I mentioned or showed before, in posts or on discord.


With holiday’s it’s always harder to stay on task, so this month’s additions might be a little smaller, but still, important tasks were done.
I have a long list of tasks that I can choose from what I want to work on today. It contains big important and very complex tasks, or something simple that can be done in one session.
Maybe it will explain why sometimes it might look like I add stuff at random :)

Cutscenes

I’m working on expanding dialogue system, so it can be used for creating simple cutscenes like in WaB. 
I started from the paintings on the walls you can interact with. 
Also added new type of item that start a cutscene when used in inventory. For example a piece of paper with a drawing on it, that you can take a look at. 
Dialogue UI changes when cutscene starts, it hides unnecessary panels and shows the button in the bottom left corner. When pressed it hides other UI, letting you enjoy the picture 
Building on this, I’m working on first sexy scene with Briena the blacksmith (can’t really show in youtube video or public post). I added basic functions for showing/hiding an image, fading in and fading out, white splash effect, etc. Now I need to decide how to do audio effects for these scenes. It needs to be easy enough to use when adding new scenes, but I don’t want to constantly store all the effects in memory. 
Other, more complicated thing to do in the future will be making characters move around during cutscenes. It would be pain to animate their movement manually, so I need to use existing movement and navigation

Droppable and pickupable items

Non quest items can be dropped from the inventory and picked up again. They stay persistent in the game world, so if you load the save file they will be where you dropped them. Apart from player littering, it will be used for spawning items that can be picked up, like mushrooms for example. It’s the technical foundation I needed to be working for other things in the future

Night time and atmosphere


I was struggling with day/night lighting in VoB. Wanted to make dark period of night and bright period of day longer, and transition periods shorter, but couldn't wrap my head around what mathematical formula would represent that. 
So I added these little gizmos to the script. Now in the editor I can change these curves how I want and the first one will affect how light the day or dark the night are, while the second one controls the sunset light, making the light more red. Should help a lot with tweaking things around and finding right colors and light intensity.
I also added crickets sounds during the night. They spawn from some of the trees, so in the game they won’t just sound in your head, but should feel like they are coming from somewhere in the world. Planning to add birds sounds during the day, and other sound effects, like water sounds near the river, etc.

Quick Menu and UI adjustments


A pop-up Quick Menu were added into the game. It opens if you press Alt, middle mouse, or X on xbox controller. It’s needed so the game can be played with mouse only or with controller (or maybe later with touch controls). The menu lets you access other menus that would normally require to press a button on the keyboard.
A slider to change dialogue speed was added to the settings.
And clicking sounds were added to buttons :)


Pause bug


There was a bug for some time with menus that pause the game. If you quickly open some menu and immediately close it, if you do it quick enough several times clicking like maniac it can completely break NPCs’ navigation, so they get stuck moving in place till you reload the save file. I didn't know how to approach this problem, but now I figured it out. 

The problem was that all the menus and various ways to close them would execute “pause/unpause game” command by themselves, so when you do it quick enough they would interfere with each other, trying to pause the game while other is trying to unpause it. So the solution was to forbid them from pausing or unpausing the game, instead when it needs to be done they file a formal request to one single script to do it, and that script executes all requests it receives in order (in 3-4 business days xD), so nothing is interfering. 

The solution makes sense and doesn’t look like a hack, so this is reassuring to me


Herbalist


Herbalist Eilisha and her house were added into the game. I made a couple custom props, but I think her house would need more custom assets to differentiate it from other villagers.
You can see her has a large tentacle cactus plant next to her bed. For reasons, probably


Plans for the next month


Big plan for the next month cycle is to make simple quest system and a very basic quest to test it. Something classic like “bring me 3 mushrooms”

Quest system would require to keep track of conditions and check if they are met, provide info for player and also serve as a database of what was changed/achieved by player. So in dialogue with NPC we could for example check if certain quest is complete and provide specific reaction.

Ir would also have to work with existing save system and be resilient to player shenanigans. For example if we need to get 3 mushrooms, find them, and on the way to finish the quest drop one of them on the ground, the quest should update accordingly, stating that we still need one more mushroom. It funny to me that not all popular quest system plugins that you can buy for Unreal5 for example pass this simple mushroom test.

I’m mentioning this plan to work on the quest system this month so I won’t postpone complex task and commit to it.

P.S.: While recording video for the post I spotted three new bugs xD