Monsterstone: Prelude now uses Unity Engine 2021!

Monsterstone: Prelude has been running on Unity 2019.3 for a very long time now, and recently, I discovered some issues that could only be resolved by upgrading Unity. Therefore, the game now runs on Unity 2021.3, a significant jump in version number.

Why the upgrade?

The game is being built using Unity’s visual programming tool, now called “Visual Scripting”. However, this used to be something called “Bolt” which was not integrated into Unity by default, and required you to buy it on the asset store. Unity acquired Bolt some years ago, and turned it into their Visual Scripting tool. This means that support for Bolt was dropped, and the only way to fix any Bolt version related issues, was to upgrade the entire project to a newer version of Unity.

One issue that has been annoying me for a while, was that any UI element, say an image or button, would prevent scrolling inside scrollable UI areas, if you would hover over the aforementioned content. I could never figure out why this was happening, and thought it was simply me setting up the UI incorrectly. Turns out, it was an issue with Bolt and Unity, which was fixed in later iterations of Unity/Visual Scripting. By upgrading the project, the scrolling feature now works as intended, yay!

Is that all?

At first glance, kinda yes. In the long term, it is way more beneficial for me to be using Visual Scripting, now that Unity acquired and converted Bolt. It means that any future issues will be easier to resolve, and also that the project won’t be stuck with an old deprecated scripting tool. It also means that the game benefits from any improvements made to the engine since the 2019 version, though I can’t say exactly what kind of improvements were made.

Upgrading the project did cause a few headaches, for instance, though you could migrate your Bolt code into the new Visual Scripting (since it is still the same internally), there were some parts of my code that needed fixing/replacing. Hopefully those types of issues won’t happen in the future, say if I decide to upgrade the game engine version again.

I have also noticed some Unity Editor improvements, which should make the process of making the game a bit smoother/quicker moving forward.

Additions:

• A description explaining the bookmark system when completing an area.
  

Changes:

• Unity version upgrade from 2019.3.7f1 to 2021.3.12f1.
  
• Removed the scroll bar for the resource inventory and moved the top left UI further out.
  
• Scroll speeds when using mousewheel for various UI menus have been adjusted.
  
• Increased the drop chance on various “shrimp” type resources, to better reflect the amount of fish resources present compared to say wood and stone.
  
• You are now forced to bookmark the first level in the game.
  
• Reordered some UI menus for better rendering priority (e.g. so you can’t access the main menu button while in dialogue).
  

Fixes:

• Scrollable UI menus can now be scrolled when hovering over their contents.
  
• Profile selection menu properly resets when opened.
  
• Main menu shortcut key is no longer usable during various states of the game.
  
• Fixed various backend bugs.