So for this update I reworked the GUI style so that it isn’t completely obvious this game was made with Unity, I’m not sure if it looks any better. I implemented a bar chart, I was really hoping there was a library for Unity similar to the System.Drawing.Graphics in .NET, so that I could draw the graph to a texture using all sorts of shapes and line styles and then draw that texture to screen. I ended up just using GUIStyles and the unity GUI system, I lose the ability to draw fancy lines and geometry and the chart has to be redrawn every frame.

I refined the development cycle and added delays and bugs. I decided that marketing is a separate “work-item” on par with the design document, the alpha and such. Basically, to market a product you assign a team to do the marketing, as you would when developing a product. There are two types of marketing: Advertisements and press relations. With advertisements your product gains a lot of attention when the marketing is done and with the press, your product gains attention while the marketing is in progress. When you start a marketing work item you decide how long it will last for and how much money you want to spend.

Currently, you can only market products that are released, and products slowly loose the ability to generate income over time, so if you haven’t gained 100% attention at day one, you will be loosing a lot of money. So, I need to find a way to enable marketing for a product before it it has been released, because currently the marketing work items need instantiated products, but products only get instantiated when they are released and before that, they are work items. So, it looks like I might have to refactor some things.

Finally, I did a lot of work on the graphics-side of things, other than enabling shadows, which is apparently a thing in the free version of Unity now, I modelled, rigged and animated the employees.

The employees look horrible and I hope to find an artist to redo them at some point. My plan is to use blendshapes to have the model dynamically change between woman/man and skinny/obese and then having the texture for their clothes, hair and face randomly generated. Normally you would probably model the clothes and make blendshapes or bones for the facial features, but I want the game to be pretty simplistic graphically and I think textures will do. I would rather have less graphical fidelity with a timeless design than going all-out on graphics and having it look comparatively ugly in a couple of years.

So, for this week I got a lot of the UI done, which is obviously using the Unity GUI system. Unity Technologies recently announced a switch to a better GUI system in the upcoming release, so it’s going to suck pretty hard redoing the entire GUI when the time comes, but I’m sure it’ll be worth it.

I also finally implemented some of the development cycle. You can now choose what type of software you want to release, how much you want to focus on innovation, stability and usability, pick a team to design it, then promote it to alpha and release it when its done.

In the final version there will be delays at the end of the alpha, depending on how competent your employees are, a beta phase of fixing as many of the bugs as possible and after release you will have to take care of marketing and assign a team to support customers and fix bugs, or get a bad reputation. All of these steps will be affected by many factors, which includes how good your employees are and how well they are doing.

When you release a product, its quality, compared to similar items on the market, will have an effect on how well it sells. So, if you release a 3D modeling application  right as another company has released a much better one, yours will sell less, but you can use it on your next game without having to buy a license. I use a large amount of variables when calculating how much your product will sell each month and how much popularity it generates.

Finally, I simulated winter. It seems like a good way to illustrate time passing, though the snow texture and particle effect could use a loving hand.

For this week of development I had a lot to implement to get to a point where I wasn’t just going to abandon the project. I expanded the AI of the employees (more on that later), I implemented stuff like hunger, energy and satisfaction. I also strayed from the blocky look by making the walls thin, which required making corner walls and dealing with all sorts of z-fighting issues, which eventually culminated in a convoluted algorithm that rebuilds all rooms on a floor when you change something, and merges all the walls, windows and doors in to one big mesh.

I also implemented meetings. I work as a student programmer and we have meetings once a week, and they’re always very interesting, I learn something new and I get motivated. I wanted to recreate that in Software Inc. by giving boosts for a team if they’re in a meeting, which requires a team leader setting them up, and tables and chairs to sit in.

It took me some time to decide how tables and chairs should be implemented. I ended up with a solution which determines which tables are touching and groups them together. Chairs can only be added to tables and will be added to the group the table belongs to and when a leader wants to use a table group, the room finds the largest available one. And finally I started modelling furniture, as seen below, I am NOT a 3D modeller.

I also felt like I had to implement the ability to choose working hours  for each team individually so the game doesn’t get boring between 4 PM and 8 AM.

After more than 12 years of developing games in my spare time, I finally managed to stick to one project for longer than a couple of weeks and I really think it’s looking promising.

The kicker for me in actually keeping my motivation, I think, was having a large detailed todo-list of everything that needs to be done in order to make the game playable. I’ve tried this before, but I usually slack a lot in keeping it updated. I’ve found that dedicating some time for cleaning the list and elaborating on points has helped keep up the motivation and I always have an idea of what to do if I get bored. I really can’t overstate how important this has been and if you’re into game development, I recommend that you try always having clearly defined tasks waiting to be completed.

I’ve been thinking about creating this game for quite a while now. I first started developing a school tycoon game, but realized all the action happened once a year when the it was grading time, the rest of the time was spent waiting. I then tried developing a 2D version of what I am making now, but I got stumped on some technical issues. Then I had a sudden burst of inspiration for a pathfinding algorithm and it motivated me to start again in 3D.

I was also hugely inspired by Game Dev Tycoon and I felt there were so many possibilities to go more in-depth with the software tycoon game idea. With Software Inc., my goal is to go more in-depth when it comes to the development cycle, the buildings and staff management. I want you to not just push out virtual products to gain some points in a game, but also feel like there’s an entire ecosystem just below the surface, that you have to manage.

When these pictures were taken I had implemented rooms, doors, elevators and lamps to create buildings with. I also had an employee type person, who would turn up once a day to sit at a desk/box, to test the pathfinding algorithm.