can’t wait for this to come out, it looks pretty good!
2 Likes
9/1/2023 Continued…
Hey! So since the last devlog I’ve pretty much covered all the main mechanics (building, physically connecting, collection collecting, earning money) that will be in the game and they are working really great and im super happy with them, so now it’s just time to start expanding but also polishing stuff along the way and of course adding onto the mechanics where they may be needed!
IT NOW TAKES MONEY TO BUILD!
So player’s aren’t going to have unlimited money when they start… um I just never implemented this into the prototype and kinda almost forgot about it but if you look closely at the building mode ui when the equipment is listed out you’ll see prices under each, I’m thinking the player’s will start with a set amount of cash maybe 100 and then they can start building from there, what’s going to be difficult is scaling the progression because it depends on alot of factors like how many equipments there are and the different tiers for them but im thinking of having the same tier progression and price for every respective equipment type though!
Whem you build theres a new sound for taking away the cash which sounds really well with the placing sound even though they are played at the same time, and then when you dont have enough money to place something the error sound will play! I think the sound fit the game relatively well, heres a little video!
2 Likes
9/3/2023
We’re back!
So like I said in the last devlog most of the game main mechanics are done so like at this point it’s about just refining features and adding in PINCHES of salt here in there… and of course just expanding the game and making it better and better focuses on the user experience!
Mobile Building Support
So ever since I got the Build Mode working like way back I kinda forgot about implementing the UI buttons for mobile so I finally got around to doing that! Partly because I think I was just trying to focus on just getting the basic mechanics down!
Labels On Button
For the buttons you could click like in the toolbar and now the mobile buttons for building I’ve added a label onto of them showing what they do cause it kinda did look weird with just the icon even though I tried too choose the best icons to convey what would happen if they clicked them
Adjusted Currenly Placing Frame Position
So I got a suggestion from someone who tested to make this frame higher because it was getting overlooked so I decided to position it at the center of the right hand side of the screen now, and it looks way better and it more noticable too!
ADDED PARTICLES & More Responsive Collecting!
So this is one of the most fun parts off this devlog so, I decided that collecting the plushies felt a bit unresponsive it was probably not noticable if you weren’t looking for it but on higher ping around (65-90ms) it was slightly noticable, so I decided to have the ProximityPrompt handled on both the server and client so that the client can destroy it earlier and making it feel responsive and snappy and it worked perfectly!
After this, the collecting was a bit bland of course it had the sound for collecting and the slight animation but I feel like it needed a bit more feedback so I created some particle images inside of blender!
So the first one was just a simple circle, and the other two were different variations of stars
I scripted, the particels emitters to emit when the plushie is collected and it looks GREAT! Here is a video!
2 Likes
9/9/2023
HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE’S BAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!!
HE CAN’T BE STOPPED!!!1
My Abscence
Hey guys! It’s been a week and a day since the last devlog and um, the game is going GREAT, but I’ve only done a few things though and took longer then expected because I also was learning how to be more… 
ARTISTIC basically I was starting to create the tutorial and got sidetracked because I was thinking about creating an icon since the game is pretty much in BETA right now, early beta so I’m not the most artistic person and that partnered with a mouse just didn’t go well so I hopped onto blender with a
goal in mind and I’m satisified with what I’ve learned the past 3 days, so icon for the game definitely coming soon!
I also made a tutorial about everything i’ve learned to create some great 2D art for icons/thumbnails so you can check that out here > Creating Roblox Styled 2D Digitally Hand-Drawn Art with Blender
Playground Navigation Beam
So this is basically to lead players to unclaimed plots when they join the game, it’s kinda part of the tutorial but it’s like a seperate thing though, it was actually pretty simple to make and fun aswell, so if the player joins the game they’ll see a trail that they’ll follow to claim a playground plot, and when they do the trail will be gone, it’s more of a utility thing but it’ll help players from being lost!
Here is a quick video showcasing it!
Tutorial
Finally, the game has a tutorial although pretty basic but everything is made from scratch though I really do like how it turned out though, clear a concise with enough information to get you started and the game isn’t too difficult too pick up either so that’s a plus aswell; of course I’ve designed it so I can go back and change the frames pretty easily so YAY
Here is a video of it!
Next Steps
I forgot too add like a next steps thing in the last devlog but the next thing I’m going to do is just get more testers and get more feedback on the state of the game, after that point I’m going to start creating more plushies and equipment, but I’m thinking I should probably get the plot saving setup though but I’ll have to see… the game is right on track!
See ya in the next devlog, goodnight ! (It’s like 12 AM)
2 Likes
9/11/2023
A New Direction ✌
Hey! I'm back again and since a day ago when I posted the last devlog pretty much the next thing to do was expansion which meant creating more equipment and also creating more plushies but, I had a revelation that creating just equipment would've been really limiting and also I'm not gonna lie it was hard to think of designs for the different equipment aswell, so I had a thought that instead of playground equipment that plushies would be spawning on it would be something else which im now calling "Attractors", basically these work exactly like equipment but this allows me to create a wider variety of different things the plushies could spawn on! Also it allows me to create attractors that could be tied with specific plushie collections, this would really tie in the the themes and players could instantly know what kind of plushies that attractor had the potential to spawn!Rebranding
Since the game isn’t using playground equipment it also made sense to change the name of the game so, I’ve decided the new name will be…
PLUSHIE PARADISE
Um, honestly I really like and it still has that catchy sound too it like Plushie Playground did, and the greatest part is that the word paradise can convey alot of things so players can make really anything they want to!
Map Changes
I know the map barely had anything before but now that it isn’t exactly a playground anymore so I decided to remove the layer and just have the grid on the ground!
How will the building mechanic work now?
The AMAZING thing about this change is that I didn’t have to actually change the old equipment code at ALL, only had to of course get rid of everywhere it referenced equipment and playground related stuff but the way the equipment worked is the same way attractors will work, the only thing really changing is basically the visual which was a playground theme so it means only playground equipment would be placed and stuff like that but now that I’ve broadened the scope, im thinking now players will be able to build pretty much anything of course related to the plushie collections that can spawn plushies!
So for example this mesh isn’t mine but just to demonstrate quickly, I can make plusheis spawn anywhere on it and with a bit of setup it works right out of the box, its perfect!
OR MAYBE EVEN A PALM TREE (not my mesh just for testing)
What's Next?
Honestly, just creating alot of different attractors, since right now I only have the fruit collection I'm trying to think of attractors that can be related to that and I'm thinking of having the attractors follow a linear progression where theres not so good ones to like high end attraction attractors (wow that was a mouthful)Thanks for reading and the next devlog will probably be about LIKE the attractors I’ve created and are creating!
3 Likes
I drew a bit of fanart for the game! ^^ Keep up the great work!
sorry about the overall quality of this drawing, this is one of my first digital art pieces lol
2 Likes
9/28/2023
Sometimes you have to dissapear for a while, only to return stronger
(never give up on your dreams, may this be inspiration to you)
My long absence / No devlogs
Hey guys! It probably hasn't felt that long but it's been 2 weeks, since the last devlog! So basically shortly after the latest devlog, I felt the placement system was lacking and since the new re-branding I wanted it to have walls, and possibly layers... AND I did get the walls working eventually maybe a week after the most recent devlog but it just wasn't working how I wanted too and layers wasn't really hard to implement but it would be weird to have floating layers if there wasn't any support system (i.e walls), so after this I kind of was in limbo on what to do, I think shortly a bit after I learned some mroe blender and found out how to use Geometry Nodes and then after much distractions I came back to the game and I decided that I should just expand and improve on the mechanics the placement system rather than try and implement features that the game wasn't exactly ready for..! So the past weeks was just alot of trial and error and failures, over and over but it was worth it in the end though! I basically had to recreate the the entire placement system many times but it wasn't too difficult!Proper Rotation
So in the last placement system, I didn’t realize that the rotation wasn’t actually proper rotation, all I would be doing is rotating the building piece by 90 degrees, which of course was rotating it but since the placement system had width and height in 2D for each building piece I had to basically not only rotate it by 90 degrees but I had to also flip the width and the height, so that when your dragging the part around it would automatically recalculate the new position the building piece has to be on the grid! I was SUPER happy when I finally got this working!
So here is a video example of a bush model I created, so in code it’s size defined with a width of X = 4, and a height of Y = 2! So basically when I rotate now it’ll flip the size and recalculate it, if you watch closely it jumps to another point on the grid and also rotates 90 degrees!
Dynamic Placement Piece Size Support
Yay, so basically in the old placement system it only supported the same width and height (i.e 4x4, 1x1), so this kind of ties into the rotation a TINY bit, but now basically this allows for better feeling placement and just better control of how you place things because when you rotate it flips the sze allowing for more accurate placement!
Better Placement Indicator
I think the box indicator that the old system used was kind of clunky and it didn’t look really clean so I decided to add a highlight in it’s place! So basically now, when your able to place the highlight fill color will be white and when your not able to place it’ll be red!
Consistent Grid Rotation
Before this was an issue I glossed over but it would’ve been detrimental when I introduce saving and loading, because the rotation of each paradise is different so basically the grid coordinates wouldn’t be correct depending on which way the paradise was facing so basically, here is a paradise that isn’t rotated at all; the grid would start at the bottom-left hand corner
But depending on how I rotated it; it wouldn’t have the grid start at the bottom-left hand corner and this would be a problem for obvious reasons because let’s say a player saves their paradise on the unrotated one and then they come back to the game and decide to load on one that is rotated 90 degrees, everything wouldn’t exactly be in the right as they placed them relative to where they are looking…
So in order to fix this I had to basically rotate the grid the amount the paradise was rotated and this made every single paradise grid start at the bottom-left hand corner regardless of rotation!!!
Better placement security
So when the player decided they wanted to place a certain object of course I checked if they had enough money, but the problem was that I was also sending the final cframe of where the part should be and I was sending that from the client, which means, an exploiter couldve passed any CFrame and then thhe server would’ve just put it at that spot, but now instead I use just pass over the current location on the grid the mouse is closest too and of course the width and height of the object and the server will calculate all of it and make the cframe on the server without having to ask the client for it, and no latency either!
What's next?
It has been so much fun making the game better even though I didn’t make a whole lotta progress on paper, the placement system is WAY better than it was and I’m super happy about that!
I’m probably going to add some finishing touches to some of the placement system code and after I create more attractors; I’ll probably come back and implement deleting attractors on your paradise as that is probably a feature the placement system definitely will need; the reason I haven’t done it up until this point is because the attractors are intertwined with the plushies so like clean up would be a bit messy but probably not as bad as I think though!
The game still needs alot of plushies and attractors so now that the placement system is finally at a not only playable state but I’d like to think pretty professional… I can FINALLY focus on honing in on my blender skills and creating some beautiful models!
The game is right on track and I’m super happy about how it’s coming along; it’s been a journey and it’s crazy how much time has already passed but let’s keep making this game though! Thanks for any and all the support!
Until next time… (hopefully won’t be 2 weeks LOL)!
@PuggleyCake I can’t find words too tell you how greatful and appreicative I am of that fanart you made 2 weeks ago, It’s beautiful and everything looks AMAZING… It means so much too me that you put that much time in effort into it for a game that isn’t even done yet! Thank you so muchhh, words really can’t explain 
1 Like
9/28/2023
Better = More Leverage
WHOOOOOOOOOOO IM SO PUMPED GUYS, NEVER GIVE UP ON YOUR DREAMS/GOALS!
Dynamic Width & Height Sizes / Dimensions For Attractors
I was super stoked when I got this working yesterday while it was a simple calculation it will help out a TON in the long run when there is alot of different atttractors! So before I would have to determine the vitrual width and height for an object by looking at how many grid tiles it occupies, and you can see how this could become very tedious if I had to figure out each width and height, and the worst part is that if I decided to change the grid size, I would literally have to manually go back in and change every single one of the dimensions..BUT now the dimensions are automatically calculated depending on the grid_size and the tile_size!
It starts off as having no values
But when the game starts it calculates the dimensions for every single attractor in the game, right now it’s working fine as I only have 1 attractor table right now but later on if I need to make optimizations then I will do what I must!
Here is different grid sizes, and the Grave attractor’s dimensiosn being perfectly calculated… oh it’s so beautiful
5x5 Grid
10x10 Grid
20x20 Grid
50x50 Grid
And this is great segway into…
Major Performance Optimizations/Improvements
So, this one is really exciting because yesterday aftter making the last devlog, I was thinking of attractors ideas… and while I was testing stuff with building on the grid I decided to test it with a bigger grid size, it was originally 18 x 18 which worked great and little to no performance impact but a 50 x 50 grid really started to tank the performance… I knew exactly in the code where I had to optimize but I was having a bit of a hard time wrapping my head around how I would restructure it, and finally today I figured out that it was the double loop going through the grid which was really expensive, so I decided to switch to an ipairs loop and now… the performance is even BETTER and the great thing is that I can go up to 10,000 GRID POINTS with only the tiniest bit of performance loss ( I run roblox at 182 FPS so, it’s probably unnoticable to people on 60 FPS)! Of course the higher it goes it’s always going to be taxing on the computer but I don’ think ill be needing a 100 x 100 grid for this game but… it’s really cool that I’ve optimized it so the player experience can be better!
Here is a quick demo of a 100 x 100 grid, this means 10,000 total grid points!
What's next?
I think I can FINALLY, start just focusing on creating more models now, it’s just that the grid placement system has alot of different things I have to take into account and I was just want to make it as good as possible, the next devlog will surely be models I created! Thanks for reading!
2 Likes
9/28/2023
The halloween season is pretty much on it’s way and since the game’s new rebrand no better time to get ideas for attractors then looking at the halloween season itself! I’ve only made these 3 as of now but, planning on making more and I’m thinking attractors will be limited to different time frames like you wont be able to buy or place them until that time of year is close like Christmas or Easter for example!
I’m not the best modeler but I can always go back and change what I don’t like!
The Grave
You might’ve seen this in the previous devlogs HAHA… i was so excited to get a devlog out that I didn’t switch it out with just some random testing building piece, but I’m pretty happy with the model and I know a great plushie that could spawn on this one… HAHA or well under…?
Cauldron
This one was uh.. getting the rim was a bit tricky and the overall shape was hard to capture but I think I did a pretty good job with it, also added some decorative bubbles but I'm thinking of adding effects ontop of that when they are placed of course!
The Coffin
The last one I made today and probably the most fun to make, I didn’t have enough knowledge on how to make the cushioning inside but it can always be changed later on though…! I’m thinking I might make a different version as like in fantasy type stuff mummies have regular old coffins but the one I made seems more like one for a vampire!
What's next?
I’m going to keep creating halloween themed models until I have enough to where I can start creating plushies that will spawn on them, I’m not the best modeler but the more models I make the better I get; also I’m using gradient textures and I think it’s really fitting for the game… thanks for reading, cya on the next one!
4 Likes