A Turret's Life is a first-person arcade shooter/tower defence game for PC and VR where you are the tower defending an area against the endless onslaught of attacking robots and combining overpowered modules that can be traded as crypto-backed items.

Updates

The Game Loop: I have finished the foundational scripts to transfer the game into the different loop states, and made decent progress on the UI and its inputs.

Progress

The Game Loop

I have continued to chip away at the foundational aspects for the game loop. Nothing too exciting yet, but I am getting more of the tedious aspects done.

This week I finished setting up the player’s data structures for their offline account, and architected how it could connect to the online account in the future. Now, I have nearly finished setting up the UI input system and am getting a hang of the UI flow design tool I have.

Here is how the initial UI flow for the first menu looks. Each button enters into a new “screen node”, which has its own custom enter and exit behaviour, and can send messages to other parts of the code letting them know when the player pressed a certain button, for instance when they start the game.

Of course, nothing works right out of the box. Unity’s current UI system got me about 80% of the way through, but has a few oddities, like not wanting to let me change the default buttons. This is a bit of a pickle for the VR cross-platform compatibility... My favorite quirk right now, is that the Unity system will let me navigate through the different buttons with a gamepad, but not accept a gamepad button press to click a button. So, I have had to implement a custom button pressing system just to fix that. I will have to do a few more custom solutions for the VR controls, no doubt. But the best part of this, is that I should only need to do this once. After the system is built, it will be reusable for other UI systems that come across in the game.

I guess all of the little bugs I encounter gives me something to write about haha. Otherwise things would be too easy 😉

Life Experiences

Thankfully we had the Labor Day long weekend here, so I was able to get some much-needed rest. Balancing my life and the project has continued to be very difficult as usual per this last month, and I am getting quite frustrated with my current day job and the stress and overtime I’ve been putting in. I am hoping to try to take a few days off in the near future to recuperate and actually do some gaming of my own, as well as make some good headway on A Turret's Life.

Sadly, this weekend I was not able to spend as much time on the project as I'd like, spending much of the time just sleeping or catching up on the usual tedious household chores. That said, I think I am starting to recover a bit more and can hopefully get back into the swing of things (though, it doesn’t take much get knocked down again *sigh)

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Website: https://www.aturretslife.com/

Telegram: https://t.me/aturretslife