First development day

Yesterday was my first development day, It didn't go as I imagined.
I woke up pretty early but after breakfast I went for a ride on my motorcycle, I came back just in time for lunch and then I chilled a bit. I got to work on my game at around 3pm and at 5pm I had meeting where I need to be so not a lot of time.

I started by creating my project structure and importing assets from unity asset store that I will be using. I'm using asset for simulating pixel materials like sand water etc... It's not as easy as to just call it and manipulate what I need so I had to explore it deeply.

I started by importing it and making demo scene work. This part wasn't too difficult I just had to replace input system with new one and enable both in project settings for it to work. I think I also had to make something addressable but it was mentioned in asset documentation.

For next hour I was looking through the code of this asset, trying to figure out how to modify it to my needs. I managed to load empty map that I created and also do it in my scene instead of using provided demo scene. This part was a bit trickier. At first I tried to just use pieces of code from original asset to call right functions but there were always some issues as I tried to cut corners. So after failing with that approach I copied two main objects from demo scene that manages loading maps and simulating pixels. Then I made copies of two scripts attached to those objects and replaced originals with my copies on game objects. From here I could modify them to fit my needs without worrying about braking it and having to reimport. Here I managed to disable unnecessary visuals and code and proceeded to load my empty map and start simulation.

Creating empty map was a little bit of an issue in itself. I used provided template but it have to be sliced and saved into multiple images of same size. I'm using GIMP as image editor, at first I was trying to do it using version I had installed but I quickly bailed on that. Because when I managed to slice my image it opened around 32 tabs that I needed to save. Other option was to save it for web so it saves and slices automatically but this option left out empty spaces so my maps were not right size.
I solved this issue by installing new version of GIMP and installing plugin for batch compiling.

Now I have to figure out how to manipulate sand just like I need. That means spawning it from collision of particle and moving it by drag and drop. Once I figure this out it should be possible to implement all functionalities I planned out.

Thank you for reading!