Glori, Dev. Blog Entry 3: Things are going...Good

Once again, Tuesday has come around and I have another week of progress to record. While I'm planning on starting the tutorial video next week, I can safely say everything is going surprisingly well and while there was one or two revisions I needed to make, for the most part I stuck to the plan I set up last week. 

Last week I stated that "For the Proof of Tech I'm planning on making a simple transition from the over-world map into the game board mode."

And so here's what happened since then...

Step 1: Get it on paper.
This step was a bit of a cheat as I kind of did it last week.
"The main character will roam around the over-world map with each step causing the system to run an RNG check. If one of these checks come back positive, a battle will be triggered and the battle board level will be streamed in while the over-world map level will be hidden away. The User's partly will be placed into position while a region-based party will be generated and placed into position."

Step 2: Break Down what's needed.
Asset(s)
->Sprites (An idle sprite for each of the directions the character can be facing as well as sprites for each of the key poses in the character's walking animations, again for each direction.)
​Functionality 
​-> Movement code for the over-world
->RNG Battle trigger
-> Level streaming for when the battle is triggered

Step 3: Assets 
Using photoshop, I created a single sprite for each of the following directions: left facing away, left facing, left facing towards, facing towards, and facing away. I then mirrored all the left facing sprites to get the right facing sprites (seeing how THIS character is symmetrical, this was easy. However I made a note reminding myself that not all the characters will be symmetrical and to take care).
After all 8 sprites were made, they were taken into Krita and an in-between, "stepping" sprite was created for each, bringing the total up to 16 sprites. Next, all 16 of these were duplicated and mirrored to get the second step ( For example, if I made the downwards facing sprite neutral to start off and the second downwards facing sprite taking a step forwards with the character's left foot, the mirrored sprites will have another neutral sprite followed by a the character taking a step with their right foot.) This brought the grand total of sprites to 32. 

**Note, because i mirrored some sprites to make others, i had to tweak the copies to fit. This was a point where I had to come back to a few times because the tweaks were never accurate enough when doing it blindly without seeing how it looks in engine**  

Step 4: Functionality
After importing all the sprites and getting them to look half-way decent, I stuffed them all into a folder and switched gears. First, two levels were created, one with a plane and a few boxes to represent an over-world and one for the battle arena. Next, a data table was made and the character's information was added to it so that the following code had something to work from. (More detail coming in the tutorial video). After the data table was created, I jumped into a new project and tore apart the default 3rd person controller, taking note of what I liked and didn't like with the default controller. Once satisfied, I deleted the project and opened the default Paper 2D project and dug around that character controller. While I liked how the controller displayed the sprites, I didn't like the restriction to 2D space (yes despite it being paper 2). A decided to take inspiration from the 2. I deleted this second, testing project and returned to my own. The the result was a custom character controller with the movement and collisions of the 3d controller and the display of the 2d controller. I created a quick sprite (2 simple stick figure sprites with one neutral and one mid walk) and filled an extra entry in the data table with those sprites and a placeholder character. Using the inputs from the keyboard to give the character a direction to move to, I made a quick check that loops every 1/120 second that updates the displayed sprites. Finally, after the sprite was checked, an RNG check was made that made a random int from 0 to 100. This was compared to a value (50 was used to keep things  clean and orderly) and if the created int was equal or below the value, the over-world level would be hidden and the battle level (currently just a few tiles and a pawn owning a camera) would be streamed in.

Step 5: Finishing
Once I was sure that nothing was going to blow up, I swapped out the data table reference from the entry with the stick figures to the one with the real character. (Had to do a bit of sprite editing to make it look right). I also switched out the placeholder, over-world level with a new level with a proper landscape actor.

And that's where I am right now. As for the bug testing well....I haven't gotten there yet. For the next few days, I'll be bug testing the system and then I'll begin working on the tutorial video but for now that'll be it for this entry.