First Prototype
I started working on this little project to challenge myself and get my head away from my main project. I had this little cozy asset package that included some tiles, and thought "Well let's see what happens".
What happend was; A dive into the math of hexagons, a meltdown over UI and more polish than I would have wanted.
The base of the game; clicking on a tile, make a menu pop up, click a button and somethings happens to the tile was fairly straight forward. Even though tje tiles became faily complex with different combinations. The lower/raise ground function was easy as well, simnply using the Y cordinate to double as the heigh variable. No where the troubles began was the Hexagons
Hexagons!
They might be the Bestagon, but one quick counter argument you run into when working with them: A square grid is just that easier to work with. If you just instanicate the tiles with an ofset, they obviusly wont tile the plane neatly. And I don't know if it just because of a quirk when working in Unity or the assets that are wonky, but somehow, the math I found didn't fit. Also I found conflicting information.
CodeMonkey has a video where he sets up a Hex grid.. it just didn't fit.
My other source was a page from Red Blob Games going into the math of the hexagons... well didn't fit either.
I ended up taking a bit from here and there and winging the rest. Well it works now.
UI!
So I wanted to create a redial pop up menu, using 3D icons from the asset package. But setting up the canvas to Camera space I just couldn't get it to work no matter what I did and Google was no help.. The problem was that the buttons didn't work and even clicking on the buttons you would instead select the tile behind the UI.
Defeated I ended up doing a simple menu using assets from Kenney just to get it playable. Not as pretty or fancy I would have wanted, but it works. There are stile some quirks with the UI I havn't been able to sort out, but I managed to negate them for now.
And polish..
Well I wanted to realse this prototype days a go, but everytime I though I was getting close, I ended up with another thing I thought I needed to solve before releasing. So a quick list of things I thought I needed to do:
- Making a main menu.
- Fixing an issue where the UI was able to pop up out side of player view.
- Fixing bugs in the terraforming of tiles.
- Fixing bugs arrising from the main menu.
So whats's next?
Well I'm not sure what I want to do with the project.
I thought about using the terraforming mechanics to make it a puzzle game where an island needs to fullfill certian conditions withing constraints - Either have limted moves or be handed a limited amount of certain tiles to use.
Another idea was making a simple RT or TB strategy in the style of Civilization or WH40K Gladius - maybe with combat, maybe without.
Yet another idea is to give the game a campagin where certain challenges need to be overcome - Challenges like "Have x amount of wood"
I'll probably toy around with all of them to see what seems appropriate.
Get Tiny Island
Tiny Island
Build your fantasy island!
More posts
- Where to go from here?Dec 20, 2023
- Patch 0.2 "Free the Rescources"Nov 07, 2023
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