Hello survivors,

Welcome to the monthly progress report covering the major aspects I worked on in February 2023. As always, if you do prefer bullet points and not read everything in detail you can skip the sections after the TL;DR part.

TL;DR:

• Improved mod creation pipeline
  
• Further extended mod system
  
• Created main menu and mod selection menu
  
• Extended and implemented my own serialization system with the mod system to work around a big limitation in Unity’s serialization system when using runtime code injection via the mod system
  
• Set up basic character mod
  
• Brainstormed game logo design ideas

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With the course on UI Toolkit in January I felt comfortable to start the creation of the various menus. After a couple iterations due to new things I learned after the previous iterations I found a good workflow that makes it easy to create the menus and also give great modding capabilities to them as well. This means modders can fairly easily mod the visuals of an existing menu without having to worry about functionality breaking. Of course functionality could also be modded but that does require additional expertise. How all the things can be modded and what guidelines need to be followed to ensure stability is something I need to eventually take care of by writing proper documentation but that is something for the future. Thanks to the easy separation of functionality and visuals I put most of my attention on the functionality for now and take care of the visuals at a later time.

With the modding support being a very important feature to the game and me also using it to implement most systems into the game, the mod creation pipeline is very important. To not have to do certain tasks manually every time a new mod is created I spent some time this month making most of the steps automatic by clicking a few buttons. This significantly speeds up the creation and updating process for mods. While working on my mods I discovered a pretty big limitation of Unity’s serialization (how things are stored in files) system and runtime code injection. This limitation meant that a very important data container was rendered useless when mods want to inject custom code into the game that relies on such a container. After a lot of testing I did manage to find a suitable workaround for this by using my own custom serialization system I built in the past. I had to build this system for my modular spawning system due to another Unity serialization limitation. I probably would not have attempted to create one from scratch if I didn’t have this one already available because it was unclear if this would even help resolve this issue. Fortunately it worked pretty well and while it’s not a perfect solution it is a solution third party mods should not have any issue working with. After building the mod selection menu I noticed that some additional criterias/settings for a mod are required. For that I now added a mod config file that mods use to specify the version, an image/avatar and a custom display name. There is probably going to be more added to the config in the future as I find more settings to be required for either functionality or convenience.

The asset that I used for the creation of the character recently received a massive update. For that I decided to start creating the character using that asset from scratch to make use of all the new functionalities and get familiar with it. Much of the old character I will take for reference in order to get the new character on par soon. So far I’ve only created a basic character with it in order to not spend too much time on it just yet. The process went pretty smooth and it is part of its own dedicated mod now.

The current game logo for both the art and text are placeholders. I plan to commission an artist soon to create me a proper logo and game name representation. In preparation I did some brainstorming on what I am looking for with the logo and text logo to better be able to convey my vision to the artist.

The focus for March is on the new implementation of the game starting process. This requires a handful of systems to be set up which are not in the core project yet. This includes systems like the save and load system. I don’t expect this to take too long as it mostly requires me to extract the setup from the old project or use the old project simply as reference. After that I want to create a proper new game functionality which for example will integrate the loading and initializing of the enabled mods. Once the game can technically be started the unloading and removal/recycling of aspects in the various mods needs to be implemented for the case that a user goes back to the main menu and enables a different combination of mods. Once those systems are implemented I can focus on bringing back various features. The world generation pipeline will likely be the first one to get back into the game as most of the other systems rely on it. I don’t expect to get to the world generation pipeline in March but we’ll see how fast the other system implementations will go.

I’m looking forward to reading your thoughts, feedback or criticism in the Steam discussions.

That’s it for this update post. I hope you are all doing well.
Stay safe out there and I’ll see you in the next one.

Norman aka CitrioN


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