Inventory, Procedurally Generated Books, Custom Groups, More Hair & Premade NPCs

Introduction

A few weeks ago, I moved on from the finances to another section of the game. Originally, this was the "hobbies" or "activities" screen. However, this was changed to house another important part of the game - the inventory.

After I implemented the inventory, I worked on a shop, so the player can purchase items to populate their inventory.

After this, I moved onto creating the town. This was shown in the previous post. I presented this first, despite being made after, because of the importance of the feature.

This post is about several miscellaneous features that have been implemented over the past few weeks (minus a week off on holiday in France).

Inventory

Since I started development of my game, I have gone back and forth over whether to have an inventory. In the end, I decided to implement an inventory, as it would allow the player to interact with items, as opposed to interacting with other peeps.

The inventory can be accessed through the inventory button on the main screen. The inventory screen lists all of the items the player has. The screen is shown below:

Items can be tapped on to interact with them. This is shown in the video below:

"Procedural Generation"

Items can be bought in a shop. Some of these items are generated in-game, such as books. Books are written by a peep in the journalism career, or a highly skilled peep. Highly skilled peeps, who are at the top of their respective career will write skill books and autobiographies.

CDs are produced by singer/song writer peeps.

Movies and video games are produced by studios.

These generated items will provide a skill, depending on the topic of the movie, book, game or cd. For example, a 5-star chef may write a cooking book, which when read, increases your cooking skill.

The generated items need names, which are generated from a basic title generator based on their genre.

A video below shows the shop:

Items, when interacted with, will increase the player's skills.

Groups and Custom Outings

Another thing I've been working on was a grouping system, which allows the player to invite peeps out to certain locations. I wanted a system similar to the groups in The Sims 3, where multiple parties can be selected to visit a location.

The video shows this below:

Behind the scenes, peep IDs are being added and removed from a list. Once the outing is confirmed, the first peep in the list (which is ordered randomly) will produce a dialog to the player.

I had a huge issue with IDs being deleted from the list in parts, but found out this was due to a peep with for example, index "7" removing the 7 from the number "17", confusingly leaving a "1", which shouldn't necessarily exist.

Weddings now work in a similar way, where wedding guests are picked adding to the cost of the wedding.

Premade NPCs

Up until a week ago, all the peeps at the start of the game were randomly generated. This was to make the game more replayable. However, as I have been testing the games systems, I realised that I miss having premade NPCs which were there every time I restarted the game. This would mean that the player slowly learns the characters around town, which I found more engaging.

I decided to go down this route, creating around 50 peeps for the start of the game. I feel like this approach is the best of both worlds, as generated peeps will still move into the town as the game progresses. And, of course, peeps will be marrying and having children of their own, which will be generated at runtime.

To create the peeps, I first created a peep creator program which sped up production this is shown in the screenshot below:

This may just be me though, so I will include an option in the game to enable randomly generated peeps at startup, so you can play either way.

Visual Changes

Finally, there were some visual changes.

• Ginger hair was finally added (which I don't know why I didn't have at the start).
• 2 more beards were added.
• The "social" skill was renamed to the "charm" skill, as it is more specific to its function.
• The  "fighting" skill was renamed to the "conflict" skill, as it fits in with more interactions and makes more sense from a gameplay point of view.
• Some graphical optimisations to the buildings (reducing video memory by about 10%), and also more trees!
• All of the colours for the interactions have been fixed (universalising them).
• All options now have icons, and the text is no longer centered, similar to how it is on the relationships screen. (See below:)

Before Change

After Change

Conclusion

I haven't been writing blogs as often as I would like, due to being too busy. Also, I've been working on the social interactions system again, implementing secrets etc. I will write about this hopefully within a week.

Regards,

        Joe