Month: January 2018

A Loading Screen!

A Loading Screen!

by Gus Martin ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Hello folks!

Today’s update is about quality of life in Boss Golf!

One of the feedback we’ve received constantly regards the launching of the game. Since it goes pretty much from a black/white screen straight into the game, and the loading/processing of the terrain can take a while, some testers thought that the game had crashed upon loading. Which isn’t a very good impression!

To fix that, I’ve spread out the loading/generation of the terrain over more frames, which reduces the processing time by a bit and actually makes the whole thing responsive. And tucked it all away behind a nice loading screen, reminiscing of the Sim games of yore!

loadingData

I’ve also decoupled the processing from the start method and put it in a proper component to manage the game state. This way, the resort can be reused whenever possible to illustrate other resorts you may visit/manage at the same time. Gives me more control over when things are supposed to load too!

Of course, no implementation is ever perfect! While implementing the new loading, I ended up forgetting a couple of functions that led to this very interesting albeit unpractical golf resort!

oopsWalls

Walls, walls everywhere!

Though I’m certain a certain tycoon would be quite fond of this…

But that’s it for today!

Tomorrow I can finish off the contract/goal system, hopefully, then add in the new placement system for decoration, giving you more control over where you will put your trees. A couple of small tweaks here and there, and Alpha 0.4 will be ready to go!

Stay tuned for more news!

Money Money Money!

Money Money Money!

by Gus Martin ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Hello folks!

Today’s update is about money!

I’ve implemented a system for tracking the finances of the resort, based on transactions and their types, and re-added the cost to placing tiles and playing the holes.

Now once the player approves a zone, the amount is charged to the bank account, and the landscaper goes to work. Players are allowed to go in debt (up to a point!), as long as they fulfill their contractual obligations!

Accordingly, players are now able to set the fee for their course. They’ll be able to choose green fees, hole fees, membership fees, and all other manners of income streams. Changing it too often might anger your regulars, though!

And for some polish, added particle effects whenever money is spent/gained:

cashmoneyyo

wheres_ma_money

(If you look closely on the first screenshot, you’ll see some new UI buttons!)

So now money is in, you have basic ways of earning it, plenty of ways to spend it. As I mentioned before, you can go in debt, as long as you keep to your contractual obligations. Therefore, the next step after implementing the money will be to implement goals! These are the conditions for” winning” in a scenario, and for continued work in the regular campaign mode. I plan to make them as varied as possible and easy to work with, so that creating custom scenarios will be a breeze.

This will also bring Boss Golf closer to what I envision to be the end of Alpha: when I’ll have a playable vertical feature complete slice of Boss Golf, which will serve as the demo version of the game. Still a couple of version until then, but progress is coming along well!

Stay tuned for more!

Landscaper at Work!

Landscaper at Work!

by Gus Martin ♥ 1 Comment

Hello folks!

As part of slowing down the pace of gameplay and integrating the management aspect of the game in Boss Golf, I’ve finalized the primary implementation of the AI for the landscaper as well as changed the system for laying down tiles to make him place them!

Until now, you’d plop down a tile, and it would immediately affect the environment. This would let you create a massive resort at a too quick a pace. There was no incentive for careful planning, and it wasn’t an action you could think twice before committing to.

All of that changes now with the Landscaper and its AI. The new implementation, which will be rolled out to the other building features in the game, delegates the act of changing the landscape to the AI, and works on a system of orders.

Players will now draw the areas like they did before; instead of immediately affecting the environment, an overlay is added and an order is created. The players can then view this order’s characteristics: price, time to finish, area etc. They can modify this overlay/order with the bulldozer tool, to trim things they ended up thinking twice over. (Editing of the height of the tiles is still free and can be performed at any time, instantly. Since this is a very vital part of finetuning your golf course, I thought it better to keep it that way)

Once they are happy, they can simply Approve the order, and the landscaper will get around to effecting it once he has the time to do so. Like in the animations below:

placing_zones
Player places zones for fairway and bunkers.
approving_orders
Doublechecking the orders, the player approves the work to be performed.
executing_them
The lonely landscaper hard at work. Having more of them will get things done faster! (At a cost!)

Pausing and Resuming has also been reworked to match the new gameplay style. Time now flows at a constant rate, and can be paused whenever you wish. You can’t make time pass by faster; later, however, you’ll be able to go on “holiday”, and the Resort will autosimulate and resolve the events of the day until you come back, or while you are managing another resort. The timescale for the day still needs some tweaking, but that is simple enough! (Also, really cool to pause the game as the AI takes an awesome shot, and just seeing the ball lying in the air, waiting for time to unfreeze!)

Oh! And you are also able to set the working hours for your resort. This will impact your running costs later, but right now it controls when the landscaper will be at work, as well as when the golfers are able to be spawned on your resort!

That’s all for today, folks! Next up is connecting the money (receiving from the AI and spending on building), and adding more management. Perhaps the goals would be a fun thing to have!

Stay tuned for more!

Boss Golf updated to Alpha 0.3!

Boss Golf updated to Alpha 0.3!

by Gus Martin ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Hello golfers!

It’s finally here! Alpha has now been updated to 0.3, allowing you to do the following:

  • Have a wall surrounding your resort to keep out “undesirables”
  • A Clubhouse has been placed, from where AI golfers will now spawn
  • AI golfers will either roam around or attempt to play any hole that is open
  • They will accordingly queue by the Tee waiting patiently by their turn
  • And so will you! You can also play as the AI is playing the course, taking your turn on the queue!
  • A handful of other under the hood improvements
  • Saving and loading! No more starting from scratch every time you load the game!

That’s it for this version. Now you’ll have a more workable experience and you can see how the AI tackles your golf course. I may release a tweak later on to modify the AI a bit, like a 0.31 or 0.3.1 or 0.3a, not sure yet. But this should give you some ideas about how the AI will react.

A word of warning: If you do attempt to edit the course as the AI is playing, you may make their ball disappear! If that happens, just relaunch the game. Will work on a fix for this later.

Ditto for if the AI falls through the ground. Haven’t improved the dynamic collider yet, so depending on your machine performance, hijinx might ensue.

next_hole
A golfer waiting, another stepping up to the tee, and a third making his way to the other hole!

Now on to 0.4! The details of which I’ll be sharing later this upcoming week! But for a sneak peak, think Time Management!

That’s all for now folks, please enjoy.

If you haven’t signed up for the Alpha, you can do so here!

See you on the green!

Saving and Loading

Saving and Loading

by Gus Martin ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Hello folks!

I’ve finalized the basic saving and loading functions for the golf course. Now you’ll be able to resume building your course at the point where you stopped!

Saving and Loading now applies to:

  • Resort Information
  • Tile Types
  • Terrain Height
  • Holes
  • Decorations (and their positions)

And I’ve made sure to add some form of version control to the save files, so that I can eventually build a converter for obsolete save formats if necessary.

To make this implementation easier to manage and control, I’m using Easy Save, a really great asset for Unity to help with, well, managing and controlling your saving of scenes, prefabs, objects and whatnot. It handles most of the workload of having to write/manage your own reading/writing methods, and even allows you to create custom types. Which is what I’ve used, created custom data structure types for the scripts in Boss Golf.

In other news, I’ve also begun placing my tasks on a Trello, so that I have a better location for managing them, and can also give you guys more visibility on the work to be done. If you’d like to check it out, you can do so here!

That’s all for now, folks! 0.3 is inches away as I iron out some last minute issues with the AI. Stay tuned!