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It's been a while since we last did a devlog. Let's get back into the habit!

One of the big gains of switching from RPG Maker VXace to Unity, in the case of HopDrop, is undoubtedly the workflow which is more fluid. Creating tools that can be used in the editor is obvious on Unity, Godot or Unreal, but this is not possible on RPG Maker regardless of the version. Today we will talk about some tools designed specifically for HopDrop.

1- INTEGRATED NOTEPAD

It may seem completely silly to program a notepad when every respectable OS integrates one, it is the simplest application that exists and has existed since the dawn of computing. However, switching between notepad and Unity can become long and boring, and I have better things to do with my pencils and paper (like graphics, we will have the opportunity to talk about it). This is where this notepad comes in, since it is directly integrated into Unity, it is always in front of me and I can write down temporary information and refer to it when the need arises. In case of need, this notepad has functions for saving and loading txt files.

2- THE INSTANTATOR

Prefabs are something really great that there is no equivalent on RPG Maker... Or maybe there is, it's what we call "common events" but the technique is limited (it can otherwise be improved by scripts but it remains quite laborious). Instantiating prefabs in a scene by dragging and dropping them from the project tab to the hierarchy tab works very well. But I'm a really lazy guy, damn it's incredible. So the most common prefabs (collectables, scenery or NPC bases, among others) are createable from a drop-down menu in the main "GameObject" drop-down menu.

3- THE IDENTIFIER

In a collectathon or any other type of game that asks you to collect objects, it is essential for developers to have a follow-up on the objects that are placed in the scenes. The identifier allows to name the different GameObject according to their type and their identifier. Let's take a concrete example: the Fairies.

There are a total of 9 Fairies per world, they have a "Fee" tag to define what type of GameObject it is, they also have an identifier ranging from 0 to 8 (so from 1 to 9 in human language). We place a Fairy in a scene, thanks to our aforementioned drop-down menu, the identifier will name the object "Fee0" because the base id is zero. If we change the id of this Fairy in the dedicated field, for example with 5, the identifier will rename our GameObject "Fee0" to "Fee5".

This identifier also works for scene changers where the model is the following "Vers_SceneName" (the project name convention is in French).

4- THE PROGRESS INSPECTOR

This tool takes advantage of the previous one. It allows you to see where the development of a world is by counting and listing each collected item placed (candy, bags of 10 candies, local collectibles and Fairies) according to their ID. This tool, which draws up a report at the end of its operation, detects duplicates and the scenes where said duplicates are located as well as collectables that are not supposed to exist (for example a Fairy that would have an id of -1). Although collectables that are not supposed to exist (always a Fairy with id -1 for example) will destroy themselves ones when loading the scene, just like duplicates if one of the two has been recovered.

The aforementioned identifier is therefore very useful in the case where an error has been detected by the progression inspector, because we will be able to see at a glance the problematic collectable in the scene where it was found.

5- SAVE PATCHER

This is an external tool coded in Python and which bears its name very well, it makes the saves of old versions compatible with the most recent ones. In fact, an old save can be loaded and continued, but it will have some problems: validation of places visited at least once and missing information. The patcher solves all these problems.

The possibilities of patching saves of the RPG Maker version were, given the logic of this engine, very limited. I had to make a compatibility system to prevent the loading of old saves, which was not ideal. To overcome this problem, I had a reserve of saves for beta testers and for debugging.

This patcher will be available in the game download so that everyone can continue where they left off without any problem.

THE WORKFLOW

On the RPG Maker version, it was sometimes laborious to make a report on the worlds. As much as counting the Fairies was fine, there were only 8 on RPG Maker and even 7 in more ancestral versions, I simply had to remember where the Fairies were. As much as it is not too serious for the Fairies, the candies posed more problems, because there were 50 of them and it was necessary to count them by hand and avoid losing count. I kept track of the placement of the candies in writing in a notebook, but it remained a tedious operation.