Customization was a pretty far off dream in our game. Initially we labeled any idea related to customization as "2.0", or completely out of reach for our scope. We quickly realized that a lot of fun in the game would come from being able to customize both your character and your shop, so we set aside everything else and dedicated a few weeks to achieve both character customization and store customization.
Our character customizer went in very smoothly. We were able to add custom options for hair, skin tone and clothes. I'll dedicate a later post to exactly how we did this (spoilers: layered animators and clever art processes). Instead I'll simply be going over the store customization feature.
Firstly we have this awesome unfinished UI! The important part here is that we've hidden the player and allowed the user to freely move the camera around with the WASD or Arrow keys. All items which can be placed are in the player's inventory and will either be crafted or bought. Higher quality items provide better effects for your store, also your store has a limited amount of space to put furniture, so you need to upgrade the size of your store, too!
Next another placeholder UI! With placeholder icons (if our icon manager can't find an item's icon, it uses the iron ingot). Anyway, once you click on the furniture you want to place you have it under your cursor. Left-clicking will place that item.
Because of the structure of the game objects (grid/gameobject/tilemap), we're able to give the furniture simple transform position coordinates to place them in the world. This makes it incredibly easy to save these objects to memory or disc. All you need is the furniture object and a Vector2. Very simple.
Oh, the customers in the game use the tilemaps to path around your store which means that since our new system uses tilemaps we can very simply add them to my A* algorithm to check for obstructions. Overall we're very happy with this system, combined with the floor and wall changer we're approaching as much customization as I think we can handle.
