Devlog #11 - Gadget Seller, I Need Your Strongest Gizmo...

The last week or two have had us spending a considerate amount of time on our documentation for the game. We just wrapped up writing out our Game Design Document which came to around 25 page. Who knows, we may share this at some point down the line to give you all more of an insight into what hasn't been shared about the game.

However on the fun side of things, the Code Gremlin has been working hard at creating the backend of our Merchant system. This is the backbone to all of the shops that you will be able to interact with throughout your playtime. We knew that we would have to make our merchant system as dynamic as possible for this game, as we would have multiple different shops that follow the same structure, but would sell you different things from gadget/gizmos to resources and cosmetics. This meant that it would require a lot of thinking as to how to format it correctly and allow for different items and different shops. 

This is the concept art that we had drafted up for the Gadget and Gizmo stores in the game. In the middle would be an thumbnail view of each item, on the right would show more information about it and allow you to purchase it, and on the left is your ability manager. The ability manager allows the players to move around or equip/un-equip purchased abilities to fit their play style better.

We wont bore you with too many details of how it works, but essentially each shop uses a "Merchant" component, that controls the UI, the purchasing/previewing of items and then the actual inventory of the shop itself. We use Unity's Scriptable Objects to create data for each shop item, that just gets dragged into each shops inventory list and the merchant auto populates the UI each time the player opens it. We then use an interface based script attached along with the Merchant component to handle all of the purchasing data. This means that instead of duplicating and reworking or constantly adding to the Merchant component with custom purchase code, we can just create a new purchasing script for each individual shop and write its purchasing code in there. This was needed as each shop in the game will sell different items that do different things so there is no "One Code Fits All" solution.

Our devlogs may be slowing down now for a while as we come into the holiday season as well as move deeper into the nitty-gritty side of production, but make sure to follow us on our Twitter and Twitch pages to keep up with active development!

cám ơn and thank you,

Round Table Studios.