General Update

So it has been 8 months since the last release and with nothing to show since then, so I thought I'd give an update.

The game is still very much in development, but unfortunately university work got in the way. There is some good news; however.

I recently announced a new game, this game is for my final year project at university so not something I could avoid doing. I made sure that the project would have plenty of overlap with VoxCom, however. The plan was to give myself plenty of excuses to implement features that I knew I needed for VoxCom, and most importantly a lot of updates to GuiCookie.

The plan was, in my opinion, hugely successful. GuiCookie is now massively more featured and way easier to use, whereas before it was the main reason why VoxCom updates took so long. I can now create UI elements at runtime from pre-made templates, the logic is way easier to use, and there's some QoL changes that will just make general development way quicker.

Another thing was a 3D overworld. I am admittedly not great at maths and wanted to avoid doing too much 3D because it was a limit to my knowledge. The new project fully utilises a 3D overworld and I spent some time studying the maths behind it, and am now way more confident to use it in VoxCom. I also created a nice workflow to create the 3D map in Unity and import it into MonoGame which can easily be reused.

There's also just some general features I've implemented that are quite techy and hard to properly explain here, as well as general skills I've learnt (and confidence gained) in the other project. 

I am very close to finished with my other project, as it's a much smaller scope. I plan to properly release it soon, once it has some more content and some features that are on my wishlist. Once the game is feature complete, my programming time will be mostly freed up and I should be able to work on VoxCom again. I may have a bit of extra work to do for a university job, but that's done when I'm finished with it and won't take X amount of hours like everything else.

The plan for VoxCom is to add the better inventory system, fix a few bugs, and have the battle state be fun and easy to play. The inventory system contains a few things, mainly that items will take up multiple cells, every item will have a different weight, and units will only be able to carry a certain amount of weight. The GuiCookie update is key for this, as the inventory relies heavily on the UI.

Once the inventory system is implemented, the 3D overworld map state is next. This will just be a simple debug map where battles can be started, but it gives me a good foundation to build upon. For example, it allows me to work out how the data will be laid out for map generation, which then obviously allows me to work on map generators. The focus from there is to start making a game loop, it will be incredibly simple to begin with but will allow me to keep adding content to it until the game is ready.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to follow if you want to keep up to date with VoxCom, or if you want to know when my new game is released.