Devlog 01: The first 40 days – part 1

‘I make my own Animal Crossings. With Blackjack. And Hookers!’

Were you guys as excited as me when the new Animal Crossing New Horizons was about to launch? On March 20 it was the time: It launched and with it my Youtube algorithm spilled plenty of Let’s Plays on shore for me to watch. Too bad I didn’t own a Switch and so watching other people play New Horizons was the closest I had.

So. As someone with a year of Hobby Game Dev experience and the Unity Engine installed, there was one logical step: I will make my own Animal Crossing – and combine it with another genre I adore: City building games like Cities: Skylines or the indie game Ostriv.

A First Prototype

 On April 4^th 2020 I made my first prototype. I experimented with some functionality I needed to find a solution for as for I never coded anything similar. Especially I worked on the possibility of a randomly generated grid of nodes. The nodes will be the foundation of every building which will be built. 

Surprisingly, it kind of worked. I had some messy Raycast Detection Hit Collider Code to detect if there already exists a building on the corresponding node. This mess I was able to delete and work with the OnTriggerEnter function.

Random Levels and First Blender Models

 With the prototype working and my own doubts if I can build anything like my vision dispelled, I started to work on the proper game.

I began to make first models of buildings and to improve my Blender skills. My first experiences with Blender I made earlier this year and I am quite happy with the assets I created using it:

 I improved my node spawning and set a limit to 75 rows and 75 columns of nodes. For a short time, I must have been insane and created a grid with 500 x 500 nodes. Every time I wanted to try something out and go into Play Mode it took 10 to 15 minutes to load. Very annoying if you just want to try out if a button works as intended… For now my Node Spawning Script looks like this:

Have a good look at the lines 25 to 32. It’s the Load Method which will be called, if a saved game is loaded. Ah yes… save systems. Building mine cost me about ten days of work. More about that in the second Devlog about the very beginning of my first big game project which is called: Millville.