Yo! Currently making a game for my major project for school! I'll be posting my updates here! 😄
#Pager: WebPage Factory Building Game
clever folio
Funnily enough, this video below was the initial idea. Over the week, I showed it to my friends but they weren't really able to latch onto the idea.
So the general idea of it: s u c k e d
The next monday, consulted my lecturer a bit and soon pivoted to the visual approach like in the first video.
Kinda happy I did cause I'm starting to like it more now. A lot more than this video below.
clever folio
I've decided to call it ComponentForge. Might change it if I find a better one
clever folio
So I added more stuff.
Because this game is directed towards people who dont really know about web development, I decided to stray away from immediate terms and concepts of web development and instead abstracted them behind a layer of game concepts
Here, I hid frontend behind design, backend behind logic and just the general conveyor belts of the game in utility
I also stole took inspiration from Satisfactory's UI on milestones. Why? because Satisfactory understands its complicated. There's a lot to upgrade and a lot to improve on top of the new materials to make. To make it easier, Satsifactory groups these stuff together and labelling them under something generic like Logistics, Production. So I borrowed that concept and hid the new technologies behind the generic labelling.
I think my takeaway from this is to always remember that new players are trying to understand your game so make it easier for them by either abstracting complicated stuff behind something generic or grouping common stuff together because our brains love patterns.
It's become apparent that my game design skills are absolute ass so I'm trying to put more thought and intention behind my decisions now
clever folio
It was high time, the conveyor system was improved from mere splines and dots. I managed to sit down to try and rack my head on non physics based 2D conveyor belts. They were, simpler than I expected. I was clearly trying to overcomplicate things.
clever folio
ComponentForge: Web Dev Factory Building Game
clever folio
A small highlight from my twitch about a new material for the conveyor belts. I've managed to add the new conveyor belt system which looks a lot better
clever folio
managed to be able to build the game! here I've whipped up a factory that produces 2 of the required pages.
Though it's throttling hard lol
Comparing this from the initial prototype, i think it looks a lot nicer!
ComponentForge: Web Dev as a Factory Building Game
lucid flower
gotta admit this looks really really cool and pretty unique!
Am I correct that its a factory builder with a web dev theme?
like you build UI?
clever folio
yep!
clever folio
gotta admit this looks really really cool and pretty unique!
thanks for the kind words! means a lot
clever folio
i've been getting the video clips occasionally whenever I stream. The streams were initially a way for me to record my progress over time but some of my friends decided to just hop in every now and then to make it a little lively
clever folio
Finally designed all the buildings
clever folio
Doing alright so far. Manage to spray pesticide on the project and get rid of a few bugs so it seems like we're on time. I'll obviously add stuff as I go because I can never really plan that far ahead
low herald
looks really cool!
real tundra
Doing alright so far. Manage to spray pesticide on the project and get rid of a ...
Great game!
Would you mind me asking what planning software that is on the picture?
zenith drum
Great game!
Would you mind me asking what planning software that is on the pictu...
That looks like Notion's timeline view
clever folio
Spot on
clever folio
Not much graphical stuff to show since a lot of the changes were done from the code. (Mostly tieing up UI with logic)
Here's some screen caps of the upgrades working for now
and I guess here's some code for ya.
I recently created a little framework that mimics some of the functionality of unreal engine's work flow inside of unity. In Unreal Engine, one does not simply slap the UI in the world nor tie it to the player. It's kind of attached onto the player at run time via a widget attaching method so I mimicked that workflow here
BindUI is by far my favourite method I've made. It simply just takes a variable and the TextMeshPro and ties them together in one line. so when the variable is changed, the textmeshpro is updated as well.
The idea of this was greatly inspired by React's useState where the web page magically updates whenever a variable is changed. It almost looks like black magic at times. I liked that a lot so i brought that idea over into Unity
So yes, my UI comes in the form of prefabs. this way, each canvas is only responsible for 1 thing and 1 thing only opposed to when I would cram
every
god
damn
page
into the world canvas.
i know all this sounds like yap so I'll just link the git repo here
lucid flower
i know all this sounds like yap so I'll just link the git repo here
https://git...
just a heads up, repo is not visible :))
clever folio
While working on the tutorial scene, I added a lil detail modal with some lil clips about how a node is supposed to be used
clever folio
A lil change for the mergers. I stole took inspiration from shapesio's stacker node
and 1 more as I cleaned up the project a little bit and found the old SVGs for the nodes
i love laughing at the decisions of past me
also let my teacher and father test the game's tutorial over the weekend
safe to say it got demolished with suggestions and criticism
so still quite a bit to do
i also now realize i say 'oh my god' a lot
clever folio
Never thought I would be able to do it but here we are. I've managed to get conveyor belts to automatically split
splitting the line renderer and updating the colliders took some work but hey not bad.
clever folio
Good riddance to the text buttons for the build menu
clever folio
Drag to select, batch move, rotate and delete!
clever folio
experimenting with the main menu
since we have about 5 weeks left to submission date, thought I'd start rounding up some edges. Starting a game is easy but finishing never really is
clever folio
I promised myself I wouldn't do text tutorials but for the sake of time since the deadline was approaching, I went with a style that somewhat resembles that of Honkai Star Rail's intro UI.
I can already hear my friends going: "I ain't reading allat bruv"
clever folio
I thought, why not just lean in hard into the fact that its a factory building game about UI
Play button and quit button are now items on the conveyor belt haha
added a small chance for a catto to appear
why? because i like cats
should i do it for the title too lmfao
might as well right
clever folio
i just realized that the buttons on the nodes in the main menu are interactable
happy accidents
clever folio
thank you!
shapezio was a really clutch inspiration in terms of the UI and the color scheme
clever folio
Decided to change the general structure of the level select to a more basic and familiar form.
I can fill in the space with some placeholder conveyor belts moving stuff around
daring ice
nice