Devlog #7: The Toolbar

Greetings folks!

Another two weeks have gone by which means I’ve reached the end of another sprint! This one was all about the brand new Toolbar. The toolbar serves as a replacement for the old backpack slots. At the moment, up to 10 item types can be stored in the toolbar and quickly accessed. When a toolbar slot is “active” that item will appear in the robot’s hands, allowing you to deposit items into machines or throw them around the map. Each toolbar slot can store a stack of items. Currently, there is no limit on the stack size, but I plan to enforce reasonable limits after playtesting with this change.

To implement the toolbar, I had to learn how to use Unity’s new UI system. While this went pretty smoothly, it still required reading a lot of documentation and forum posts to get everything working how I wanted. I anticipate future UI work to take a lot less time now that I understand the basics. I also spent a significant time this sprint on a new icon generation system and quite happy with the results.

Keen-eyed readers may remember that I talked about adding an inventory in addition to the toolbar this sprint. I actually started work on an inventory, but realized that, with the number of items currently in the game, it wasn’t really important to add right now. Thus, I decided to polish up the toolbar systems and interactions and work on a few other fixes. I do plan on revisiting the inventory later on so stay tuned for more info on that.

Changelog:

• Toolbar UI design
• Toolbar UI animations
• Allow the character to store held items.
• Animate items coming out of and going into the backpack
• Auto store items when attempting to pickup a different item or perform an action that requires empty hands (like smelting and mining)
• Update toolbar upon picking up and dropping items
• Allow items to stack in the toolbar
• Add support for quickly switching the active toolbar slot
• Improved icon generation
• Update ECS package (twice)

That’s everything for this update! I still need to plan my next sprint so I haven’t decided what I’ll work on next. It will also be a shorter sprint as I’m leaving for a vacation in early April.