NPCs, New Assets & More!

It's been a few weeks since my last devlog and I'm happy to say NPCs are finally mostly working! I started with children NPCs since they're the ones to interact with the playground equipment, but once they were working I opted to add adults and janitors as well while the code was still fresh in my mind. 

All of the NPCs track hunger, thirst and washroom need. When they're hungry, they'll look for a a place to purchase food if one exists. If thirsty, they'll look for a drink, etc. Once the NPC has food or drink, they'll look for a place to sit down if one exists. Hunger and thirst levels increase faster when they're sitting so it's advantageous to have enough seating in your park. If the NPC has no other "needs" then they'll interact with an appropriate object. Children will look for playground equipment and games. Janitors will look for trash and full bins, and adults will look for adult appropriate attractions. 

The design of the characters is a combination of trying to match the vibe of the game while also making something scopable.They needed to be cute while also being simple enough that I won't be spending the next 10 years animating. Characters are generated with random hair, skin and shirt colors, though I'm only working with 8 colors so there is a limit to the variety. They also have their own names, money and stats. 

I was finding early on that was having some performance issues with the character's movement. I did have to reduce how often the characters were checking for a new path because I was seeing big framerate drops when there was more than 20 or so NPCs in the room. Lesson learned: you don't need to find  a new path every frame. Now that that's solved I haven't seen any framerate drops so I think I'm pretty satisfied with the system.

The only thing left before the NPCs are fully functional is having them leave the park when either the day ends or one or more of their needs can't be met. There's a few details I need to sort out before I can set that up so for now NPCs are on the backburner until I can circle back to it. I may also add some different NPC types, like builders or gardeners - but for now 3 already exceeds my expectations for this stage. 

In the meantime I've been working on the day cycle and creating some new/updated assets for the game. Time is tracking just fine so I was fiddling around with some fancy lighting. I'm not really sure it matches the vibe though, so I think I may leave it out of project for now. 

I've been doing a little bit of art as well. Several of the old assets have been redrawn and I've started on some new things. There's vending machines, bathrooms, picnic tables and a couple new pieces of playground equipment. Most of them still need to be animated but it's a start! 

Here's just a couple new things on the way: 

I think the next step for me is going to be getting some UI in the project. There's a lot more elements than the jam version (current)  so the new UI needs to reflect that. I admit UX/UI is not my strongest suit so I'm honestly not looking forward to this step. I want to keep a similar layout and feel as the original version but we'll have to see what works! 

Anyway, thanks for reading! <3