This Week in Unity

This week the graphic designer, Krees, and I started work on the kingdom maintenance screens.  We completed 4 of them throughout the week: Basic Settings (Kingdom name, Win Message, Corpse, and Vacation), adjusting your tax rate, buying/selling keeps, and enlisting peasants into your army.  Most of these are used only once or twice but we are chipping away at the functionality.  The last two screens under Kingdom are Vassal maintenance and the Royal Vault.  The latter will be challenging, as there are 50 magical items players can obtain with a wide variety of effects.  Additionally, some can be used, others can't.  Some take arguments, such as a Player's Name or City, some don't.  I don't have the design yet but I'm anxious to see it.  Here is the new basic settings screen:

Another import add this week was the inclusion of the Advisor (bottom left).  The Conquest! game server processes all of the commands sent to it by clients.  Until all situations are handled by the Unity client, the Advisor will contain the text of the response from the server.  Some checking will be done by the client, to minimize the number of error responses.  It is also a great tool for debugging.  We also added a players total peasants to the HUD.  The HUD now contains all the essential information a player needs to quickly check on the status of their kingdoms.

Here is the new Buy/Sell structure screen:

These new screens were relatively easy to add, as I created a structure while working on the army screens which is fairly easy to replicate.  Unity makes it easy to copy/paste Game Objects from one scene to the next.  Once I have the base structure in place, this pop-up window for example, I swap out the controls I need and in just a few minutes the prefab objects are done.  Similarly, I copy/paste the accompanying C# code and voila, a new working scene.  For example, take the Advisor object.  I created all the GUI elements under one GameObject, so I just need one cut/paste to create the UI prefab.  I created an Advisor class, which stores all the UI elements and the code necessary to update the pop-up and the message indicator.  Once I got it working on the Overview scene, it took a few minutes to have it on the others.  Here is the new Enlist screen:

As you can see, these screens are just variations on one another.  We have not yet started work on any of the buttons on the bottom of the screen (Alliance, Population, etc.).  Prior to tackling these I would like to move to the City screens, since this gets us a little closer to a playable build.  There was just one small fix to the server this week: a bug fix when sending over a certain help command without being a player in the game.

Finally, here is the adjust tax screen:

The Kickstarter support has taken a noticeable dip.  I do plan on continuing development of Conquest! once the campaign ends.  Please consider supporting us with a pledge of any amount: http://kck.st/1LTthng

Follow the journey on Facebook or Twitter.  Until next time, I hope to see you in the game.