Cooper DevBlog

    I have made a whole lot more progress today on the game. Here are the updates so far.     1) Empire Creation: I have created a scriptable object and a script to manage and control the empire-based actions. When created, the empire script reaches out the the name creator script and generates a random medieval empire name. It then stores all of the data such as religious stats, empire stats (gold, tech, people, wealth), infrastructure-based data (buildings, tiles, cities), and empire armies. Additionally, once created each empire gets a unique soft color which will end up going on troops and flags, and be used for other empire-based interactions.     2) Religion Creation: I have created a scriptable object for a player's religion, and I have also designed a really cool way of managing and progressing your religion. Religious progress (religious tenets, ideologies, and foundations) is controlled by a new type of card that uses 50/50 chances to determine wh...

     A lot of progress has been made today, and I truly mean a lot. Let's go over it below.     1) Camera Controller (Reworked, mostly): I now have the system properly moving (WASD, arrows, panning), and rotation (mouse, and QE). I have removed zoom since that was not working for me, and I was getting mad trying to get it to work. That's when I moved over to the game manager system.     2)  Game Manager: The Game Manager system was my first real solo attempt/challenge with networking. Everything else I had followed tutorials to get done, but now I had to do it solo, on a niche platform (FishNet), and with very little documentation. The turn system was challenging since I had to keep track of the states of other players (their turn, and if they had finished it). My setup is as follows: An array to keep track of each turn that every client is on. It is a global/synced value. This means if client A updates it every other client also gets it updated. ...

      Progress has been made. I have done a couple of things today that are pretty amazing (for my skill set), and in the following paragraphs. Enjoy!     1) Client Scene Movement: I am now able to send clients to certain scenes based on a string of the scenes that I want them to go to. This should work for all networked/lobby clients, but I have yet to test the system on anything other than the host system (my PC).     2) Terrain Generation: I have swapped out the old outdated hexagons for the fresh and new squares. I mainly did this so that when I was working on networking and pathfinding for roads and canals I would not have to make art combos for 2^6 but instead 2^4 for each transport type (ex. plain and stone roads, plain and stone walls, plain and stone canals, etc). This will end up saving me hundreds of hours on Blender, are will give me a bit of a more unique art style (imagine a hybrid of Polytopia and a board game). Terrain generation was ve...

      We are back!!!     After several months of not wanting anything to do with my game due to the sudden and unfortunate realization that I would have to restart everything, and also have to figure out how networking worked, I am back! I have done a lot of thinking, a lot of school, and a lot of everyday life things, but now I am back, and I have made some progress that I am wanting to share.     First things first, Steam Multiplayer...     Multiplayer is a very difficult thing to do for Unity, even more so on a very small budget ($0), and a very small amount of networking knowledge. In total, I have probably watched somewhere around 100-200 hours of networking tutorials for Unity, and I have only just scratched the surface of what I need to know and do. However, that does not mean that I have not made some progress, because I have. I just completed the most basic implementation of Steam matchmaking/multiplayer/lobby systems in the world. Y...

 What I have Been Working On 1) Account Creation Page / Logic I have added some more quality-of-life things to the signup page. This mostly includes some user feedback so that when people create an account, they can get data from the experience. For example, when someone creates an account, a little notification box appears on the bottom of the screen saying "Account Created" and "Log In". The "log in" text then sends you to the dashboard page. Additionally, if you try to create an account and the username or email is in use, a box will appear, with an error message included telling the user what went wrong. 2) User Login Page / Logic I have now connected the login system making it work with my database (which is now the correct database, and not the test database). This means you can log in and it compares the password and username to see if it is correct. It then creates a JWT token for the user and saves it in local memory so that it can be used to auth...

Progress Update (Life): 1) Just a quick update, nailed my forensics test (Monday) with a 93%. 2) Nailed my Calc exam (Applications of Derivatives: 92%, Function Analysis: 82%) 3) I have my AP Macroeconomics tomorrow with AP Psych right after that. 4) Next week I have finals for AP Mirco, AP Calc, AP Psych, AP Computer Science A, Forensics, and Langauge Arts. 5) What this means is that progress updates are going to be taking place at irregular intervals until everything settles, so sorry in advance. Progress Updates (Fintech Platform): 1) I have the connection to MongoDB established and have data being added to the DB from the signup forms. Data is taken from the forms, encrypted, and then sent to the database for storage. At the moment only the password is encrypted but I might change that. This means that I can begin moving to the next thing. At least once I fix a small little bug. Currently, it goes to a test DB and not the DB for this current project. I am going to have to figure ou...

     Welcome to the first-ever, well-defined, and well-planned version of the fintech platform. In this post I will do my best to describe what I am doing, what I am trying to learn, the next steps, and more. Enjoy! 1) Why MERN?     Choosing a framework to begin the development of this app was one of the most difficult things I have ever done. I watched countless YouTube videos, read a crazy amount of web articles and so much more. I had to find a stack that people would employ me to use in the future, I had to find something that could connect to all of the different blockchains and tools, and had to find something that I could learn, and that had a big community and ecosystem around it. I first tried ASP.NET thinking I could use it since I was already pretty good at C#, but no. No community, no ecosystem, no platform and network integration, and too steep of a learning curve (for web development, and small compared to other stacks). I then tried learning to Go...

      I deeply apologize for the massive delay between blog posts, but life got busy, and programming in my free time to a back seat to the rest of my life. So... here are some programming updates for you.     1) The Game: I have made no progress on the game since my last post. I worked for a bit integrating Steam multiplayer into the game, but it did not go well. I have made the difficult but ultimately smart decision to scrap the current game and rebuild from scratch. This way I can start with multiplayer working, and add on systems as I progress in the game development. naturally, this killed a bit of the energy I had going for it, but I think it is the best decision. We also have decided to dissolve the game studio since I was the only one programming and designing, and they have all moved on with their lives. I don't want this to be the end of the game studio, but work on Table Top Empires will be slow and not consistent, sorry.     2) Fintech: Af...

      Today I worked on the previously mentioned quality of life updates. Now when you progress to the next turn, the previous turn's notifications are cleared.     I also added event cards. This was cool as a lot of the event cards are chance-based rewards or risks. They are all 50/50 so the programming was easy, but still cool. However, the adding of event cards somewhat broke the queuing mechanisms for the dealer. I now have to fix the way queuing system, making it take into account the already purchased action and event cards, then deal and display the appropriate cards for the next turn. I also have to fix how the event cards are displayed in the auction house. They are shown right, but when I click to buy, the card does not always show it properly.     A lot of progress was made to day on the event and action cards, along with dealing, auction house functionality, and notification quality of life updates. All in all a pretty solid amount of progr...

      A lot more progress has been made on the game today!     First up is the creation of the auction house filtering system. Now players can filter the cards in the auction house by category or by era. I also added in the functionality for purchasing of cards. The money is removed from your balance, all information is shown about the card, fees are added onto the purchase cost, the cards are added to the queue of cards to be dealt, a max for auction house card purchases, and more. The system works beautifully! I even connected it to the notification system. Now it gives you a notification when you have purchased something.     Second thing is the "completion" of the notification system. There are now visuals. The color indicator changes when a notification is either good or bad. The title/header also changes along with the message of the notification. Futhermore, the scrolling and closing systems have also been added to they system allowing for playe...