
# Delvers Inc Development Update

Hello friends!  This is a quick update even though it has been almost 2 months since the last update.  Mostly this is just an explanation of why there has been a lack of updates.

In a nutshell, I have had to pause development on the game for a little while.  Development is not stopped, I have not quit, it's just a pause while I deal with the simultaneous tasks of both selling a home and buying a new home...plus all the packing, purging and moving that goes with that.

You see, the tech industry in general and the games industry in particular is in a very bad state right now.  I originally started Delvers Inc because, despite 31 years of experience as a software engineer, I couldn't seem to land even an interview much less a new position somewhere.  Every week, heck every DAY we were hearing about new mass layoffs and studios shutting down.  Frankly we are STILL getting those layoff updates and studio closures.  Just recently Hypixel was shutdown and Hytale was cancelled.  I had interviewed with them last summer and, while I didn't make the cut, the game they were building looked like it was going to be amazing.  Now they are gone as well and everyone there has been let go.  It's a bit apocolypitic to be honest.

Anyway, that was a long winded way of saying that I am going on a year and a half unemployed and my severance ran out 6 months ago.  So my family and I are moving and downsizing to a place more affordable in order to get the time needed for me to finish Delvers Inc (see, I told you it wasn't cancelled, just a pause screen).  

There is a lot to do when buying a home.  Legal paperwork, scheduling movers, packing, purging junk, getting utilities and internet setup, it's seems like a list that never ends.  Selling a home is even worse with all the cleaning, painting, repair jobs that you left too long, getting out of the house for open houses and showings, negotiations, more lawyers... it's another list that never seems to end.  So that has been consuming my time and leaving precious little for Delvers Inc. work.  By the end of July we should have it all behind us and be in the new place where we can leisurely unpack all our belongings and I can get back to work on Delvers again.  

So...not cancelled, haven't given up, just had to pause while I deal with some life stuff and I look forward to giving you more substantial updates with real changes after the dust settles from the move.

Thanks for reading and bearing with me.  Talk to you all soon!

-Arakiel


Pause Game Screen


# Cinco de Mayo Update + Some Discussion About Scope Creep

Happy Cinco de Mayo everyone!  This is one of my favorite times of the year because it's a great excuse to eat Tex-Mex food and my family can't say no because it also happens to be my birthday.  Win / Win!  

## Fun Stuff To Add

It's funny how that can lead you into some serious temptation though.  Yesterday (May the Fourth Be With You btw) I had the "brilliant" idea to add some Cinco de Mayo themed items to Delvers Inc.  The thought being, hey let's add some tacos, some enchiladas, maybe a margarita, that sort of thing to the game as a fun little side item.  Adding items and giving them effects is pretty easy now, I would just need some icon art which I probably had in one of the many collections I draw from.
<img src="/images/Doner.png" alt="Taco" width="150" style={{ display: 'inline-block', marginRight: '10px' }} />
<img src="/images/GlassOfJuice.png" alt="Margarita" width="150" style={{ display: 'inline-block' }} />

This morning I started to really think about it and plan out what needed to happen.  For a start...what effects would they supply?  After all, just having some food items that don't do anything would be kinda pointless.  It didn't take long to hit on taco = +1 heal, enchilada = +2 heal, and margarita = +1 attack but also -1 defense.  So that wasn't too bad but...it felt kinda silly to put them in chest drops.  I would need to sell them somewhere.  Selling them at the merchant seemed equally silly, but we have an Innkeeper, unfortunately the Innkeeper was currently only set up to have a dialogue with the player about getting the location of a new dungeon map.

We could make modifications to the Innkeeper dialogue scripts to have an option to buy each of the items but that isn't very scalable if we add more food-like items.  We could add the ability to open a shop like experience but right now the Merchant is an entirely different UI panel and we don't have a separate shop UI, so then we would have to create a new UI for a pop-up shop.  Suddenly this is looking like a lot of work for something that was supposed to be just a fun little bit of 'frippery' (that's your 0.25 cent word for the day).  

## That's Scope Creep

I ended up dropping it for now, what started like a fun little sounding thing ended up being actual work.  Which really got me thinking about how easy it is to scope creep yourself.  Back in the day when I was working for game studios, it was not uncommon for a designer or product manager to come up with a little idea that sounded great on paper.  That's when one of two things would happen.  Either a) they would ask for an estimate and get dissapointed when it turns out that the simple little thing had actual work attached to it that couldn't be justified, or b) it would get pushed forward anyway as a pet project of someone and suddenly timelines are getting blown and other bigger and more important features are getting delayed.  Invariably engineering would get blamed for it no matter what.  "Engineering is always over-estimating timelines to avoid adding new things, they must hate fun!" or "Why is engineering always slipping and missing their deadlines?  Lazy slackers need to crunch to make up the time!" 

Scope creep being recognized AS scope creep and shelved without acrimony was an incredibly uncommon occurance.  There are, of course, places that are better at it, but for the vast majority scope creep is rampant and the blame game lands squarely on engineering when it happens.  We should be better at communicating about it but for whatever reason, we aren't.  Is it ego?  Is it a facet of everyone having too much to do already that having a discussion about it falls to the wayside?  Is it, in fact, on engineering's inability to properly articulate the technical aspects and costs of a request so that non-technical people can understand the impact?  Probably it's a little of all of those things.  I can't blame a lack of good communication and ego on Delvers Inc's lack of tacos and enchiladas though.  I am a one man shop so I am only having to communicate with myself.  Kinda like my wife having a parent-teacher conference when she was home schooling our kids.

## Delvers Inc. Updates

What's up with Delvers Inc though?  Well since we last spoke Delvers have gained classes.  In the end, I felt that classes just added clarity to what a delver does in ways that a classless system just doesn't.  I love classless systems, one of my favorite old-school MMOs was Asherons Call which was famously classless.  However, classes add a bit of definition to a party management based game.  Special Actions have finally gotten implemented, they are still just called Special Actions for now, but they work!  Delvers can also be upgraded outside of their level.  You can "consume" three other delvers of the same type and rarity level to upgrade another one to the next rarity tier.  
![Upgrade Delver](/images/upgrade-delver.png) <br/>
This also means that our leveling data now has different values for each level AND rarity tier so that having an Epic Varro Duskrun hits harder than a Common Varro Duskrun.  I have been working on some eye candy for the UI to give it a little bit more pop and less of an Excel spreadsheet feel to it, courtesy of the DoTween Pro asset.  Finally I cleaned up a few bugs that had been hanging around for awhile which is always a feel good moment.

## The Plan For This Week

This week I will be focused on getting more of the flash into the UI and into combat (floaty damage numbers anyone), as well as a foray into some sound effects and background music.

Thanks for reading and keeping up with Delvers Inc!  We'll talk again next week and in the meantime, follow us on X and Facebook for updates or sign up for our newsletter so that you don't miss a post!

-Arakiel


Cinco de Mayo Update + Scope Creep


# Delvers Inc Update!  Also, be careful with Cinemachine

Hello everyone, Arakiel here with a new update on Delvers Inc. 

You may remember from last week's [post](https://www.delververse.com/blog/marchant-updates) that I had managed to give myself a ton of extra work by forgetting that A.I isn't I.  Well I finally managed to fix all that.  It took all day and then some but I got there and cleaned up the horrible code problems.  Things make sense again!  Huzzah!

While I was in there cleaning up the disastrous refactor, I got equipment equipping again.  Then I went on a cleaning spree.  We now have TownData which will be and is, used to define what a town IS and what resources are available to the guildmaster in a given town.  Moved from that, on to a camera problem I was experiencing.  That one is actually worth a slight side trip to talk about honestly, but first...let's finish the project status update.

Health potions!  Got a basic usage system finally put into place so you can now buy and use a health potion if your cleric can't keep up.  ![health-potion](/images/small-health.png) <br/> And yesterday I finished up the basic party management panel.  ![party-management](/images/simple-party-management.gif) <br/> No more do I have to live with the party of 4 "Starter" delvers that I set up months ago.  Long live Varro Duskrun!

I have the basics of a party formation system in place but that is not fleshed out very well and I am honestly not sure if it will make it for the 1.0 of the game.  That might come later.

## The Camera Problem

Shortly after getting the dungeons working and the Delvers delving, it became obvious that I hadn't considered the follow camera showing areas outside the map.  The camera would always keep the party of delvers centered as it followed them around but that means as they got close to an outside wall, it would show the... "void" the blank area or unused space in the scene.  Very ugly.

I set about finding a way to keep the camera within bounds and quickly hit upon several topics from folks recommending Cinemachine for it.  This was a great idea, Cinemachine could also handle the follow logic very well and I could get rid of the camera update code I was using to track the party.  In addition, Cinemachine has a Confiner component which will do exactly what I was looking for...keep the camera within a boundary.

I got the latest Cinemachine installed into the project and got to setting it all up only to find that it wasn't working.  As soon as I would set the boundary, the main camera would get "lost" off screen.  The Cinemachine camera was fine but it's the main camera that wasn't.  Cue lots of debugging and hair pulling.  I watched many tutorials, I read the documentation, I experimented, poked and prodded and... nothing.

The tutorials I had been watching were all for the 2.x version of Cinemachine so I had to do a little translation since Cinemachine was now on 3.x starting back in September of 2024 but that was fine.  It was mostly just component name changes and some slight inspector differences.  So it should have still worked, but I couldn't get it to.  I then shelved it for a time, I would get back to it later with a clear head.

## The Cleaning Spree

During my 'post-refactor-refactor' cleaning spree I decided that I had lived without a bound camera for long enough and that I was finally going to get that sorted.  After diving back in I immediately hit the same wall that I had weeks ago.  Everything was setup correctly.  I had double, triple and quadruple checked all the settings, revisited the code a dozen times, cleared caches, everything I could think of and it simply refused to work.

## The "Fix"

That's when I decided to downgrade.  It was my last desperate attempt to get this to work before I junked the whole thing and wrote my own bound camera logic from scratch.  I downgraded to the last 2.x version (2.10.3 if you're keeping track).  I had to revert everything back to 2.x namespace and components but that was easy enough and done quickly.  I hit the magic buttton aaand.... it just worked.  I sat, rather dumbfounded, staring at the screen as my delvers moved around the side of a dungeon and the camera stayed within the dungeon boundaries I had setup.  It...just worked...

I posted it to the Unity Discussion forums just in case it was a bug or something with the 3.x versions of Cinemachine since that's certainly how it feels on my end, but for myself I am going to stay on v2.10.3.  Someone from Unity responded yesterday and asked for a sample project that shows the error, but I haven't put one together yet since I have a million other things to do.  I'll get to it at some point.  In the meantime, watch out for Cinemachine.  Seems like they aren't yet at feature parity with the 2.x versions.

## What's Next For Delvers Inc.

Next up on the docket is more work on the delvers themselves.  I need to get special actions working, I need to come to a final conclusion on whether or not I want delvers to have classes or not because I still waffle on that.  Then I need to be able to upgrade the delvers quality tier, not just their level.

That's all for now.  We'll talk again next week and in the meantime, follow us on X and Facebook for updates or sign up for our newsletter so that you don't miss a post!



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Cinco de Mayo Update + Scope Creep

Delvers Inc Update and a Caution with Cinemachine

Welcome to DelverVerse

Recent Posts

Pause Game Screen

Cinco de Mayo Update + Scope Creep

Delvers Inc Update and a Caution with Cinemachine

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