Serialized Thriller

[Oafkad]

  You might not know this but Unity has some pretty strict serialization rules. It's a very lean system that is designed to be very very quick. Unfortunately as you get further and further into C# you'll find yourself wanting to use systems that aren't supported by Unity. You can achieve this through Odin but it does have some quirks.

  The first is that serialization will ultimately be a bit slower. I've never noticed the difference but we'll see if at scale it becomes much more noticeable. If push comes to shove I can always write an editor script to save all my data to disk, then swap back to the default unity serialization and have it apply the settings again.

  I'm ultimately not too concerned. This is all part of the journey. The reason for all of this was that I'm getting further with excursions! We naturally don't need to save a lot of data for who is going on an excursion. Merely storing their unique ID will do, these unfortunately are not serializable by native Unity. I need to go through with a little bit of refactoring and then apply all of the settings that were lost with the shift.

  We now have our catalog of all available excursions (only one exists currently), and some basic data. This leaves me then with actually adding in the functionality to assign Moosecats to an available excursion, and finally if all is met, starting said excursion. This should be easy enough to do, I've done similar work at my job. Basically we want to think of it like this:

The player opens up their interface.

They select an excursion from the list of currently available.

This then displays UI where you can apply whatever configurable settings we've provided. Which critters to send, what they should bring along, and maybe buffs you can apply. We'll see what is all entailed.

Once you satisfy the minimum requirements we'll turn on the button to send out your friends.

They will pack up in the Manor (or wherever) and wander off the property. Once they do they'll unload and be off on the journey.

Time will pass and you can track the progress in your journal. Eventually some kind of signal will appear to show you that they are done.

They will reenter the manor and walk about. Perhaps you'll be able to collect everything just straight from the journal, but I would also like to add the option of meeting them yourself to collect whatever they found.

New resources or new friends. Or even more rare, new journal entries. These entries unlocking new places to explore, new rewards, etc.

I think that about covers it at a high level. Each of these steps can be done one at a time until we have a full lovely experience. That's all I've got for tonight though, my eyes are getting tired and I need to rest up for another productive day!