Dev Blog- Colonial Sea Trader- Polishing dialogs

This week was primarily spent polishing the dialogs edited last week, as well as fixing a few visual bugs. The biggest change was a few upgrades to the cityscape, which you can see below.

Also fixed was a bug that didn't show the correct value of the goods, and other dialog bugs. I will spare you an image of them, trust me, they are there.

This week I want to fix a few visual issues. Basically, those items that appear in world space don't have a consistent look. They sometimes appear behind the ship, sometimes in front of it, and sometimes even between the ship, all of which just don't quite look right! They also don't scale well with size. This week I plan on fixing all of these issues! I'm also hoping to get the website ready to go, however, I'm wanting to try out one additional thing before I'm ready to put it to the test.


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Dev Blog- Colonial Sea Trader- Dialog upgrade finished, city look finished, speed improvements.

A good deal of progress has been made this week! The short is, I have completed the theme application, which uses better text packages, supports localization, and easy asset upgrades for most of my future work! Here are a few sample images of what has changed. Note that I'm still going to tweak the edges of the city, seek first.

I'm still going to be working on improving the graphics, but less diligently for a while. I started to do some bug fixing. I started to fix bugs, including some that speed up the world generation, UI issues, and that sort of thing. The camera now centers correctly on the ship, some crashes were fixed, I removed some dead code, improved my organization, and a lot of other things that aren't easily seen, but make a difference to me.

This week is bug crunching. The main item on deck is improving the way that the UI elements display on the world map. They don't scale well, and often don't appear at the right level, I'm going to be playing with that some to improve the looks. I also hope to do some work with the website to get it into a reasonable condition.

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Dev Blog- Colonial Sea Trader- Improving the look, continuing to work on the town layout, starting a website

This week has been an interesting one. I'm continuing to work towards getting it ready to show off. To do so, I improved the look of the mountains and terrain in general, I started working on a website, and continuing to work on the town layout that I've been working on for a few weeks.

Looking at the terrain, I realized that I had made it too flat in appearance. I fixed this, as can be seen above.

I also have started to replace the city layout, as I've mentioned a few times before. You can see how it will roughly look, although I'm continuing to improve it. The next version the buildings will look different, and the city label will contain more information, slightly. I'm fairly confident I can have a fully working version of this by the end of this week!

As mentioned, I started a website. I have a host, and will be continuing to work on improving things further, although I'm still trying to decide exactly what it will look like. Stay tuned, I hope to have something in the next week or two. It will result in a new blog location, and I'm going to try to import everything from this blog to the new one (At least, all of the dev blogs for this game). My Amateur Radio following group will be happy to have this return to it's original purpose!

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Dev Blog- Colonial Sea Trader- Building a city layout

This week I've continued to put together pieces for my city layout tool. I finished building design, and started to layout the city. In the process, I learned how to do something I've long wanted to do, but haven't gotten to yet, namely how to do custom inspectors!

The city layout still isn't quite as I want, I want to do more bitmasking instead of the current layout that I have. I've started work on it, but I just haven't gotten to it yet, I'm hoping to have that done pretty quickly. Assuming I can finish that, I will then add the buildings to the layout, and hopefully have a functioning town!

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Dev Blog- Colonial Sea Trader- Button improvement, Reworking the cityscape

The first thing that I  did this week was to improve the buttons.

I started working this week on improving the dialogs, but I quickly realized that my current ways just weren't cutting it. My first poor attempt ended up as follows:

This just looks hideous, and I started thinking, there has to be a better way. So I thought about it, and made the following sketch:

I showed it around to a few people, and generally they liked they idea. I then started playing around with how to make it work, most notably looking at Kenney's graphics.

I think that kind of style will do. I'm still working on generating these automatically, this one was a bit of a manual pain, but when it's done, I'll have procedurally generated building using Kenney's artwork. I will then decide at a future date if I want to keep going with that, or improve it further. I've toyed with doing some kind of a 3-d model similar to how my world scene is generated, but for now, I'll go with this, and see how it looks.


This week I'm going to work on setting up the city, allowing one to visit places by clicking on them instead of the small buttons that are currently available. I will continue to improve the dialogs. If I have any time beyond those two items, I want to fix the tooltips, that can sometimes appear behind items, and the size is too variable.

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Dev Blog- Colonial Sea Trader- Theming the UI, adding support for localization, lowering reflection

This week I had two major accomplishments. The first was to add localization support. Note that I'm not fully localized yet, but it's coming along. The second was to add a theme system to my game, to allow for easily changing large sets of items to have a particular theme, allowing me to tweak the look of the game. I also toned down the reflection, which was mentioned by many people to be a bit too high for most people's tastes.

So, why localization support? One of the things I decided to do was to change the font in my game. If I was going to do font, I might as well change everything to a Text Mesh Pro. When doing that, it seemed natural to do two other changes that would require touching almost every box in the game, localization and theme support. I added both of these, and have been gradually changing the fonts to support these changes.

I'm content with most of the buttons, although I'm still going to re-work the ones in the lower left, which currently just contains a single button. I haven't decided what I want to do yet with that, which is why I haven't bothered theming it.

The themeing was accomplished by using Scriptable Objects, which I allow for picking a background, font style, font color, and image color.

I'm still trying to figure out exactly how I want the dialogs to look. I haven't figured it out yet, but I'm getting there, slowly.

For this week I'm going to continue to work on the changes from last week, mostly focused on dialogs. I might then take a break from all of this to figure out a website, now that I have a name and am approaching the minimal threshold that I can consider seeking out Steam Greenlight or KickStarter or generally speaking to get the name of my game out there, although a website is really needed to take that next step.

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Dev Blog- Colonial Sea Trader- Yes, it has a name finally! Also, UX improvements

Well, I've been talking about it for ages, and it's finally happened. This is no longer the unnamed Sea Trading Game, it has a real name! And that name is Colonial Sea Trader.

Still working on the artwork, of course, but there it is!

And there's more! I've been working on improving the UI considerably. I've reduced the amount of things on the screen, showing just the important stuff. I've also done the start of an effort to improve all of the dialogs. See the start of it below. Note that there will be tweaks, but it should be something like what you see below.

Other improvements include the start of keyboard shortcuts, which can be expanded easily further,
improvements to the map edges, studying some of the edge cases to improve the display, and starting to do work to improve some of the artwork.

This week I'm planning on continuing the UI updates I did last week, and in general will be working on the polish of the game. I might also improve the tutorial, world creation, and other such things, I haven't decided yet.

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