Tuttle's Legendary Travels
Development Blog - All Posts in Category "General"
How Things Are Going
Posted by Blyka on July 25th, 2017 - 03:00 pm EDT

We're fast approaching three months since the last demo release, and any dedicated followers of the project may have noticed that progress has been pretty minimal since then, with tweets strictly limited to #TLTuesday and often echoing much the same content as the previous week. This is because we have been very, very busy since the last demo, and with a demo just launched TLT just hasn't been a high priority lately. It also hasn't helped that some big obstacles are up next on the features list, making it all the harder to make headway--especially when you can only snag a few minutes each week.

As things have been so slow and tweets have been fairly repetitious, I thought it might be good to let everyone know of the situation and provide a little roadmap of sorts with the main features planned for the next demo.


Input System
I believe there to be many reasons that community enthusiasm for TLT has been lacking lately, but I suspect the present input configuration is a biggie. After all, when a game specifically designed for a dual-stick gamepad comes up with no customization options and a strange-for-most preset, that can't make it much fun to play around with what we've got.
Unity's new input system is supposedly rolling out in the next few months, but as a beta. We're not sure how good it will be when it finally does release, but one way or another we intend to have customizable controls for the next demo.

Dialogue System
What's Legends without NPC interaction and pulling items out of holes in the walls? Getting dialogue boxes and interactions is the next biggest priority after input, and should really start to make the game come alive as a full experience.
Unfortunately, doing this up right is as difficult as it is important, so it's still in the earliest stages of planning.
We did have the start of a system in the works a long while back, though its viability has recently come into question after discovering just how much garbage is generated by string concatenations. Might be able to salvage some of it, but we'll see.
 

[Splash Mine]


Special Weapons
Getting special weapons up and running with the introductory Splash Mine is an important step towards completing player functionality and further rounding out the experience, and of course once the system is properly in place, future special weapons should come a bit easier.

Super Character Controller
When the project started picking up speed a couple years back I attempted to use the Super Character Controller (from the Mario 64 HD project), but as Tuttle kept falling through the floor, I stuck with Unity's native (and terrible) Character Controller in the interest of immediate progress with the idea of trying again at a later date. Well, that date is fast upon us as we're coming up on higher functionality needs like forcing the player off of NPC heads and riding on cars.
Haven't sunk much time into this, but it seems to be going about as well as last time. Incidentally, if anyone out there has experience with this and has any idea why the player always falls through the terrain, give me a shout. XD

Pause Menu Keyboard/Gamepad Support
Hey, what do you know, this one's actually done!

Etcetera...
No telling what upgrades may come between now and the next demo in the way of new enemies, larger environments and so on, but this is my definitive priority list.

Also no telling when our schedules will free up to allow faster progress, but in the meantime we'll keep at it every Tuesday we can if even just for a few minutes here and there.

Thanks for reading!


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