Devlog 2: add NPC and dialogue system, updated inventory and hotbar panel
Progress
It has been quite busy these days, but I managed to make some decent progress on my game: I added a NPC with extensable scripts and nodes, created a dialogue system using an addon called DialogueManager, and upgraded my inventory and hotbar system.
I’m quite happy with the current design of the NPC for now. The only thing that’s needed is a daily itinery so that the NPCs can feel more alive. For now the player can interact and have a conversation with the NPCs thanks to the addon DialogueManager. I’m the kind of developer that likes to implement stuff from scratch, so it’s really uncharacteristic of me to rely on third-party addons that I know little of. But I think it’s more important to get things done instead of knowing and implementing every little functionality. As ConcernedApe once said: people don’t really care about what’s under the hood as long as the game is fun. I decided to adopt this mindset for the whole development process of this game, since there is no point of making game dev even harder than it already is.
As for the inventory and hotbar system, I created a global autoload so that I can access the inventory items whenever I want to. I also updated the UI components since I learned more about creating nice UIs in the last couple of weeks. There are still some things not working 100 percent, like the selected item stack is placed at the center of the inventory panel instead of where the mouse is, which is annoying but not a game breaker.
Pixel art
I’m working on creating the tilemaps for the environment following a tutorial from 7 years ago, which talks about create Stardew Valley like grass and soil tiles, which is really helpful. But I’m not gonna use these tilemaps since I don’t want my game to look like Stardew Valley, I already have some ideas of what the game and the world would look like, I just need to execute on these ideas and improve my skills