MMO Prototype - Mini update

 


I took the time this week to fix the bugs that were present in last week’s near-hour long demo.

Now that a good amount of the basic systems are in place, yesterday I was able to work a little bit on the user interface and connecting it to some of the functionality you may have seen previously. It’s great to see that things start to fall into place.

Items can now be looted and exist in the inventory and the server dictates whenever or not the items fit in the grid. Likewise, items can now be dropped anywhere in the world.

There’s obviously a lot to tweak. As the GIF can show, the large 3x2 item in the inventory was a log that I had gathered from cutting down another tree. Instead of dropping the stack of logs as an item, the server interpreted it as planting a tree as it has yet to make the distinction between the source and its associated resource.


My plans for September:

  • Display item stack amount on the inventory icons.

  • Display item tooltip when hovering the cursor on inventory icons.

  • Complete the first gameplay loop: Placing a housing foundation on the ground, gather resources and deposit these resources into the foundation to complete the construction of the house.

If all goes well, I’ll be able to start working on combat as early as October; 15 months since I started the project.


An interesting thing to note is that I’m really liking this “dev once a week” style pacing. They’re quick bursts that allow me to see progress while still giving me plenty of leg-room to spend more days if I want to “crunch” a bit. I might actually adopt this while working on my main project.

If I had but a single project, I’d probably dedicate 3 days within a week; that gives a good 4 day buffer.

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