Bringing things together

Hello everyone,

it has been a week since my last update and I wasn't lazy in that time even I didn't work as much as the weeks before on my project. I could complete some tasks I had on my list, some I stroke because things wouldn't work out the way I wanted them to. So also I needed to cut the scope a bit and just went with the next thing that made the most sense in game play-perspective. This was: improving the fireflies and create something about them.

So first I introduced a health system. It is pretty simple and not much to say about it. Now the bugs can have different statuses depending on their type. Friendly bugs have no attack points at all, enemy bugs have a life point less but an attack point. So now the red bugs can kill green bugs and the goal would be to bring your bugs to a safespace without having bugs killed. This sounds like game-play and fun if it could be gathered in the right environment.

NPC Status, very simple..

So the next thing was to make the safespaces work in a way that they can not hold any number of fireflies. So I did the same as I did with the different glowworm types. I made a scriptable object in unity that defines safespaces to create different types, with different space. Like this I can have some that can hold 3 fireflies and other that hold 10. That was easy too.

Next step was combining these systems to work nicely and pass some values to UI Elements I created to give some feedback to the player and voila:




So I know I doesn't look like much. But all the parts are working and I can even control an UI with these data. I could alos controll shaders with these values. Speaking of shaders I realized that the color swap shader was not providing me the light-circe effect I wished for the safespaces to have depending on the amount of saved fireflies, so I will find another lighting system. But maybe I can still color the tiles and levels with this kind of shader.
But once more I decided to go for functionality rather then looks, so I will keep these shaders for some other opportunity. For now I see that I could build some simple levels with these elements, create a level manager to check if the goal was reached or not an go on to the next level. This could become some kind of prototype to give to people to test if the mechanics is fun and the project worth building upon.
After all this implemented I needed to clean up my code a bit and now I am asking myself, where to go next.

I could introduce the players health system. The red bugs are now just attacking and affecting other bugs not the player. I thought about switches to open doors and stuff like that. It could work with the lanterns that could work as a switch, when all bugs are inside. I am not quite sure about the next steps to take and in which direction this project will go. But I am happy with what I could get together so far and I start to feel it is about time to harvest some feedback from you guys about the whole thing.

See ya.