Unnamed Item Shop first month

In this devlog we'll be discussing the various aspects of what we did in our first month of development. We'll cover important things like what we accomplished and how we set our expectations and processes to get the most out of the time we had. One of the first things we did to give ourselves a very vague direction was to make a few statement about what the game was. We first came up with the very baseline statement: "You run a fantasy item shop". As long as the game meets those expectations, we were on the right track. Instead of trying to rigidly force the game to be something, we are creating the systems one by one to enhance our first main idea.

Things We Accomplished:

Art:

One of our big challenges was coming up with an art style we liked while also keeping a resolution and feel that would be easy enough to do within our time limit. We were initially thinking about doing a 32 pixel base size, but ended up going with a 16 base pixel size because we were able to get plenty of detail and style. Not to mention the characters came out looking absolutely cute. We're doing very well on the amount of sprite sheets we have already created with enough assets to make the entire player's shop, most of the exterior scenes and a few of the other interior scenes in the game.  Since the pixel art represents basically every aspect of the game, this section can be summarized as: Everything you can see, is the art we've accomplished.

Systems:

We started creating systems for the game by layering various managers over each other as well as other independent systems such as character movement, pause functions and camera movement. Keeping these systems completely separate proved to be incredibly useful earlier this week. We were faced with a major refactor of the inventory system, it was the first thing I started working on with the game and since it's my first unity project it had several issues. A refactor was in order and because the systems were so independent, after I ripped out the entire inventory system all other systems were functioning fine. The shop system was also working pretty well, customers will walk around the player's store visiting a random amount of points of interest before deciding if anything in the shop is worth them buying.

The user is also able to set custom prices on each item in their store, which works really well both in the fantasy of the game and as a mechanic (Also note the placeholder icons ?) .

All of our UI components are also broken out into prefabs, which makes it incredibly easy for our UI manager to perform all CRUD operations on them.

Guilds, a fairly major feature in the game, are also implemented (although I only have 2 coded at this point). Each one can consume or produce resources and each interact with each other based on those resource production/consumption. It's currently in the air if we're going to do guild reputation at this point.

Summary

Overall I think we were able to get a lot accomplished, especially considering the fact that this is our first month of development time. We had a lot less direction and far fewer goals in the beginning, but now that we're under way we really are just blasting along. I think one of the most important things for us was to set an impossible development time, while keeping the focus of the game razor thin. If we get to the end of that development time and there's something missing or the requirement to add more systems we can easily add additional development or testing time. Also since we're beholden only to us and what we want to get out of this game we're not burdened with meeting other people's expectations. The first month has been very eye opening. Learning new software, learning a process that works for us (as a two person team) has all been really cool and we're looking forward to the next month of development.