Returning to the Project (New Art)

Long Break

After a long break from working on the project due to university work, I have returned (at the start of 2022).

Picking up from where I left of was no easy task, as I had to familiarize myself with the code again. Luckily, I stopped in a convenient place, after just (largely) finishing the AI system.

New Art

To ease myself into the project again, I decided to start with making some art. I have gone back and forth on the art style for the buildings in the town. Ordinally, I thought the game would have an isometric town. I also had the idea of having a 2D front on view of the town, with separated neighbourhoods. The latter is shown below:

What the neighbourhoods would have looked like (with placeholder art, and unfinished)

After making this art, I returned to the engine, imported my creation and tested it. However, when testing, I came to the realisation that the scrolling felt unnatural and I still preferred the isometric look (also, note that this has been largely copied from here, as it was only a prototype).

It looked like this

I went back to Inkscape again to see what I could create. After playing around, I made an isometric house, it looked something like this:

I liked the look of this house enough to start making some more, and eventually made an entire cul-de-sac. This is also shown as the first image of this post:

I still haven't finished and need to create all of the other "commercial" buildings for the town.

Using the Art

Once I had the first few houses I imported them to the game as an SVG. This could then be used as the basis for some more coding.

I had this idea, largely from The Sims 3, where the town would be interacted with by tapping on the building you want. This would then open a menu to interact with the building.

The current reverted state of the town looked like this:

With each square representing a house (purple is unoccupied; black occupied).

Instead of replacing the squares with houses, I decided to transform the squares into icons representing the buildings. This meant that the houses could be imported as 1 SVG file. The icons, which would go above the houses looked like this:

The town now looked like this:

House Interaction

As I had previously created a function to render the occupants of any given house, the same could apply to these new icons. When you tap on a house, it will show the occupants. In this case, only the orange and green icons represent people living in the houses.

I have attached a video of this in action:

Naming

As you may have also noticed in the video, houses are named in respect to the player (also aging for the player has not been implemented). This is due to a function which returns the house name based on its occupants.