State of the Game - October 14, 2023 (Patreon)

Hey there, everyone. Time for another devlog update on CCC!

So, the game is in an interesting spot right now. In a good way. As many of you all already know, a major reason 0.6 has taken so long is because of all the code refactoring I've had to do. It's essentially remaking 90% of the game at this point.

The good news is that almost every system that needs to be refactored, has been refactored... I think. We're past the largest hill at this point. Right now development is mainly filling in gaps and making sure these systems actually cooperate with each other properly. For example: 

• Making sure the environment changes when citizens reach the proper weight.
• Making sure the inventory actually appears when you press the inventory button.
• Figuring out a proper formula for how high the arms need to raise when a citizen is at a specific weight.

These are all problems I'm currently trying to solve and many more!

The only main systems I haven't refactored yet are Dr. Bananahead's Weight Loss Clinic and Brenda's Back Alley. They may or may not be in the initial release of 0.6. There's stuff I want to do to expand on their systems. But that'll take more dev time, and I really want this update to come out already. So they might come maybe a month or after 0.6 comes out, who knows. I'm not entirely sure yet. They might be important enough to implement the extra dev time for.

In terms of new stuff, I think I finally got QR codes working! If you've forgotten, I've been trying to figure out a way for players to share their citizens with other players similar to how Tomodachi Life works. But without the need of a camera, of course.

This is the rough prototype I finally got the game to read properly. I wish the background didn't have to be plain black, but it seems necessary, or else the game struggles to register the code. But hey, it's progress none the less! It isn't fully implemented yet. But at the very least I know it's definitely possible now.

Some of you might be familiar with CCC's less than favorable load times. As far as I'm aware, one of the main culprits causing this is the "Resources" folder. Without getting into too much technical jargon, because of the character creator nature of the game, all of the game's character creator assets are always loaded all the time. Even the ones not on your citizen. I've been looking into Addressables, which seem to Unity's evolution of Asset Bundles. When fully implemented, it should hopefully greatly reduce load times because now all the games creator assets don't need to be loaded all at once.

I also recently downloaded an asset, Clothing Culler, that aids in masking out the body when articles of clothing are applied to it. So far, I'm pretty optimistic about it. It might require a good bit of front-loaded work, but it should hopefully remedy clothing clipping in a way that doesn't require me having to edit junk outside of Unity.

I think that's the general gist of what I've been up to lately. I'm tired, I'm probably missing some stuff. Regardless, thanks for reading! Hope to have more progress to share soon!