Game Off 2021 - YourWaifuIsALie

Blog and documentation for Game Off 2021 attempt.

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Game Off 2021 - Day 11

November 12, 2021

Study

• Turn-Based Combat in Unity
• Simple Turn-Based RPG Battle System (Unity Tutorial)

JSON definitions

Finished a basic implementation for loading “battle actors” from JSON files. The most annoying part was realizing how json.net would deserialize into non-standard objects.

For my data structures, only the boolean logic related to when effects activate contains a arbitrarily nested dictionary. So, I only need to manually parse that single field and turn it into a proper structure.

The logic is fairly simple:

• 4 keywords - “and, or, origin, target”
• Value is always a list of either dictionaries or strings
• If value is and/or, logic applies to all fields in dicts within the list until another and/or is reached

From there, it’s just a matter of recursively parsing the dictionary structure and bubbling the true/false determination up to the top. This allows me to create dumb rules that I probably won’t even get to use for the game jam portion of this game.

Time well spent?

Re-scope

As all projects go, being a beginner takes a lot of time, tangling with a lot of small C#/Unity things, let alone game logic + assets.

In this case, I got caught up on making this JSON deserialization/tag system. It’s fine since I’m mostly doing this just to learn. However, in terms of the “goal” of completing a project and a time-limited game jam, I definitely should have just dropped the system and hard-coded things. These JSON specifications, deserializing, and boolean logic parsing are only useful if I’m making a real game full of assets.

In terms of game completion, there’s no benefit implementing this now instead of getting some hard-coded thing working instead. I spent something like 8 hours getting the kinks worked out of this which is vital time considering I have no gameplay yet.

Ultimately, I’ll need to look at re-scoping and prioritizing at the end of this week. It’s a conscious decision to be sloppier in order to get everything working.

Progress

• Finished logic for fixing deserialization of JSON objects and evaluating boolean logic statements

TODO

• Figure out unit tests in for Unity/C#
• Figure out how to make Unity play nice with Git
  • Specifically non-text assets like textures, blender models, sound effects, etc.
• Keep playing with Jekyll, fixing things like links
• Continue nailing down specific battle mechanics and overworld power-ups
  • Bug-themed things
• Main character designs and 2d “sprite” (probably cutout animation) for both overworld and battle
  • Can visualize the rest of the world around the main character for consistency
• Start programming
  • Options
  • Overworld
  • Battle
    • Implement the actual battle flow (order queue, state machine, etc.)

Time Spent

22.25 + 2.5hr