Cowzy Town Friday: Petting animals and info panels!

🐄 Cowzy Friday: Petting Cows and Planning Ahead

Welcome back to another Cowzy Friday update! This week was a fun mix of project management, UI, and wholesome features. From planning out the road ahead to giving cows the love they deserve, let’s dive into what’s new!

📋 Project Management Upgrades

I took some time to step back and refine my milestones, tasks, and time estimates. As development continues, keeping things organized helps ensure features are delivered on time (and with less stress). It’s not flashy, but this kind of planning is key for long-term progress—especially as the game continues to scale. I did this in a few ways:

• Going back to my project proposal and ensuring my current Definition of Done for each milestone was accurate

• Splitting milestones up for more granularity

• Adding new tasks to my Kanban and ensuring those tasks are setup with the correct milestones

  
  

Let's focus on something else now: animal petting!!

You Can Now Pet the Cows! 🐮

Yes, you can finally pet the animals in Cowzy!! More importantly, more than one at a time!

• Hold left-click on a cow to pet it

• Multi-pet mode: Click a cow, hold Ctrl, hover over other cows, and release Ctrl and boom, they all get some love

• This system works for all animals, not just cows

• While there’s no in-game animation or effects (yet!), the system does recognize when an animal has been pet

It’s a small step for now, but it opens the door to more interactive systems and cozy player moments in the future!

ℹ️ Building Info Panel

The building info panel is still in progress. I'm borrowing from a few games, namely Age of Empires 4 and Foundation, to create something that works for Cowzy Town.

The info panel is a widget blueprint called WBP_InfoPopup. It's a simple widget that has a elements we change to reflect the needs of the popup. The only exception is that when we need to display a resource, we create and destroy a different widget called WBP_ResourceInfoDisplay that is the image & text associated with a resource cost.

When hovering over a building button in the toolbar, players now get a contextual description of what the building does and how much it costs.

• Info is pulled directly from a DT_BuildingData data table to change any icons & text.

• For each resource, we create a new WBP_ResourceInfoDisplay and change the relevant info.

• This makes the system easily expandable and keeps our UI and game logic clean and scalable.

Still a few polish touches to go, but the core is in place and working great.

What’s Next?

• Playing around with the Unreal Engine 5.5 Day/Night plugin to start implementing a full time system

• Final touches on the info panel!!!
  

Thanks for joining me again this Cowzy Friday. Every week brings us closer to a town full of life, love, and cows that are just happy to be here!!! 🐄💛