WeirdBeard's Blog

At a Glance

Over the course of the past week I finished the research feature for Treasure Hunter. Woot! I created 5 working researches which is enough to move to alpha. Let’s crack open those books.

Research Working

Last week I wrote about how I completed the research items, and since then I put in the time to finish my research code. That’s right I can purchase research and display each zone’s research tree, which are kinda important before I move to alpha release.

It turned out that coding the buying of research was easy, just two simple changes. The first was a new property in my base ResearchItem class that returns true/false depending on the research cost relative to the total research points available for that zone. And yes I use my GameManager (a singleton) track all my exploration zones. 🙂

public bool CanBuy => Cost <= GameManager.Instance.Zones[(int)ZoneType].ResearchTree.Points.Value;

The second change I made in the script attached to the prefab I used to display the research on the screen. I added a CanBuy check on my CompleteResearch() method and then subtracted the cost from the available research points.

public void CompleteResearch()
{
    if (ResearchItem.CanBuy)
    {
        GameManager.Instance.Zones[(int)ResearchItem.ZoneType].ResearchTree.Points.BaseValue -= ResearchItem.Cost;
        ResearchItem.CompleteResearch();
        UpdateResearchDisplay();
    }
}

Each exploration zone has its own research tree, making the player optimize each zone for faster play. I’ll be honest this kicked me in the ass for quite a while. I easily spent 3 hours banging my head against the wall. I had to walk away for the night. The next day I sat down with a clear head and 30 minutes later I had the first draft coded. It turned out that I had made it waaaay more convoluted then it needed to be. In the side-by-side picture below you can see that the Plains research tree has the Increase Concurrent Quests item and the Rivers tree doesn’t.

Keep On Questing

The only coding thing I have left before alpha is to implement a save/load system. It would really suck to spend minutes or hours playing a game only to have it all wiped away because it couldn’t save. On the non-code side I need to create a page on itch.io and this site to house the game. I feel good about my progress.

Life’s an adventure, what’s your quest?

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