This week we were pushing for Alpha which at the start of the week seemed more like a pipe dream. However we pulled together and crunched and got our Alpha build done.
The past few weeks I had been working on bettering the functionality and look of the Questing System and Shop. It was recommended in the last build that we add icons above each NPC's head to signify that they have a quest, talking to a specific NPC to complete the quest (exclamation mark) or a quest being ready to hand in (question mark). It wasn't too hard to implement, however since I was using a Behaviour tree as my main focus of this Questing System it proved interesting to get the the NPC to know when they have a quest. So with that in mind I got to work and figured it would be simpler for the NPC to know when to turn off and on their own quest markers by checking when the quest has been accepted, which NPC is part of the objective, and when the quest is complete.
Quest Icon
The shop was my mine focus for Alpha since none of the art assets were added to the widgets. I got to work by adding the background of the shop and exit button then I adjusted all the sizes and positions of the buttons to make sure it fitted with the background. Whilst adjusting the buttons I realised there was no way to tell how much of an item you had so I spent some time adding text as a child to each button. There was a fair few small bugs that were crushed like the image of the item when it had been bought was not showing up, the amount of items bought and added to the players inventory would also set the amount in the shop inventory to the amount bought, infinitely sell the item you previously sold if you were still hovering over that item and many more small bugs. But by the end of the day I had made the shop function and look good.
Shop UI
If you would like to take a look at the final Alpha build the link is here: https://bad-luck-black-cat.itch.io/blbcgame