Foundation and general objective based coding...? Update

A lot of progress has been made on laying the foundation of this project. First and foremost, the assets needed a lot of work ( hey they were free, so I can't complain) so I got started on that, but I'll talk about that more down the blog.

Step 1: General functionality.

In the last update I got the WASD movement for the camera and bound the mouse for edge scroll. This working nicely, but I will improve on that later.

I needed to get to grips with the ability to create objects and place them in the world. For this (As I wanted to eventually place a lot of buildings) I made the foundation functions, primarily, "If button is pressed > create a ghost instance of a build > depending on the button clicked will change the static mesh of the building that will be placed.

For generic flow, I used a Square and Pyramid to differentiate between the two objects i was placing; This was mainly to allow for non overlap systems and multiple buttons.

Disclaimer: There is a lot of code I've learned over the course of a month or so - I will not showcase it all here as it's mostly drivel.

The above function will be called when the user clicks a UI button (Currently 3 have been made) this will then call upon the building function to place the static mesh as shown below)

The above is the full function for several things, creating a "ghost" building, which allows me to call upon the building function and easily change the static mesh for other buttons later on. There's other preliminary code here but the overall experience was to allow me to create many new buttons without hassle later on in the project.

Anyway, for a more visual approach to this I wanted to see some variations that looked a bit more....well....kind to the eyes...

So, after buying/aquiring some assets from online, modular at that! I created some make shift buildings here that will be utilised in the "city building" aspects.

Lumber Mill The log pile will be dynamic, the more lumber the building has, the larger the stock pile

FarmThis building will have livestock wandering nearby for production of food/materials

BlacksmithStill not sure on this building, but some VFX might go along way.

Home 1/2Generic houses. These will have some more variants, but attempting to not make them all look the same

So, a few issues, since I have limited assets available, there's no set "time period" - I wanted to achieve a varying age from stone age to medieval. But that's not likely to be apparent. That being said, this is all a learning experience and people will forgave lack of assets if the game is fun....right ?

There's a lot of work in this project, though it doesn't look like much. There will be more to come, but the functionality is getting there and i'm now working on the AI. I can start prettying things up eventually.

Designer Note: I want the player to achieve a sense of community when they build their small villages. Eventually turning them into bustling towns and villages. Another key premise is to scale the world, everything is at 20% scale for now, to allow for a larger world with more "life"

Things I want to add:

• Roaming Wildlife (I have some assets for these, AI might not be too difficult to move between points (Yay navmesh!) - And I have an animator to hand for help with rigging them! 
• Natural events - Tornadoes, thunderstorms that sort of thing - even migrating herds of animals, if the roaming wildlife works out.
• Seasons - This is something i've always wanted to attempt - seasonal weather/asset changes, I'll need to look into shaders no doubt, but it would look cool!
• Weather/Day/Night cycle - something that should be feasible easily, a standard day night cycle will allow for some dynamic gameplay changes through the play session.
• other.... I'll add more later....