Skip to main content

Asset Creation: Shields.

I've not had a lot of time to work on the project lately, just 30 minutes here or there when my baby is sleeping so I couldn't move forward with the next stage of coding so I've been doing a little more on asset creation.

Sometimes I try something and it just doesn't work out, for example adding glasses to the character model:
A thief tries out some new smoked glass spectacles, just the thing for a hot summer's day, but near worthless in a dark and dismal dungeon.

They looked good, several versions were available, including sunglasses or regular lenses, but they are just too small. You can't see them on the player model. So although glasses will be available as in game items, they won't be included in the in game player model.

More successful was the new iteration of shield designs:
Can you spot the two identical shields? I'll have to add a transfer to one of them before they get used.

There are three types of shield, light, medium and heavy, and each type has 20 different visual variations. The game will choose a visual identity for the shield when it is first generated, this will be based partly on its quality, partly on a random element, and partly on any over-riding attributes of the shield. Low numbers are bad, high numbers are good (top three rows are low numbers, bottom are high).

All weapons, armor shields, helmets, books, potions etc... can be given random extra attributes when they are generated, they might be good or bad, and there may be up to three different special attributes on a single item.

Here are some examples for edged weapons (combat values likely to change with testing):

Heavy= Weight + 10%
Weighted Blade= Bludgeon damage +10%
Rusted= Chance of breaking +20%
Sharp= Cutting damage + 5%
Wickedly Sharp= Cutting damage + 20%
Etched blade= GP cost + 5%
Exquisitely Etched blade= GP cost + 20%
Well balanced= To hit bonus +2

Attributes will be a combination of a base attribute and an optional comparative modifier for example:
"very " + "heavy"
or "badly" + rusted
or None + "well balanced"

You might therefore have a "Very Heavy and Wickedly Sharp Longsword" which does does extra damage but is heavy to wield, drains your stamina faster and takes up more weight in your backpack when carrying it around. When the item is created only the relevant stats will be saved in its unique item dictionary, in this case, the dynamic name, current state of repair, cutting damage with bonus, weight, visual identity and parent key. Any info which is not in the dynamic item dictionary will be picked up from the static item dictionary using the parent key to search for "longswords".

Here's some for potions:

Very Strong= Potion effects + 20%
Almost Empty= Potion effects - 20%
Unlabeled=  Potion name not shown, replaced with semi-random color
Spoiled= causes nausea in addition to main effect
Large= max charges +10

Because of being unique, potions won't be stackable in the inventory, but they will have multiple charges, and so will be less common, less easy to make and more expensive than other games.

Whether an attribute is added to the dynamic name depends on your party's combined intelligence score, modified if you have a player with an appraisal skill.
You might find a "Very large and half empty yellow potion", or if your characters are good at appraising loot, it could be a "very large, spoiled, half empty healing potion".

For shields:

Simple= Repair cost - 25%
Reinforced= Wear and tear from combat -50%
Frightening= Increases terror effect when trying to scare enemies
Very Badly made= AC value - 20%

Shields are very important in medieval and dark age warfare, and I intend to show that in this game. having a shield gives you excellent protection against enemy attacks, but shields don't last forever, if it absorbs enough damage it will be destroyed and you'll have to equip another one or fight on without a shield. Shields will wear out much faster than weapons and armor so I've made 20 visual variants instead of 10 as I did for armor or weapons.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Advice needed on tilesets...

I need some advice on which is the best way to handle building the dungeon. Right now I'm using prefabs for my dungeon, they have a north south east and west section for each "room": The basic tileset. This has several advantages, and also several disadvantages. Firstly I can have curved rooms, I can have tunnels and other interesting shapes. The tilesets can look quite nice with a little work. On the other hand I can't easily get the navigation data before building the map and once the map has been built I can't make changes to the layout, like having active pit traps or believable secret doors. Although the rooms are interesting, they are quite repetitive, and it takes a lot of effort to make even a few different variations. Also rooms are constrained to one size. A newer version of the tileset with a lot of variant parts for making more interesting rooms. To create a tile set is a real headache too. Planning how to lay out the UVs, trying to cra...

Upstairs / Downstairs.

I've decided to make my prefabs multilevel. Later this should allow me to add pit traps and other great stuff. It also makes it easier to line up stairs so that you can exit them on the same co-ordinates where you entered them. The prefab editor is pretty much finished, it just needs some code for loading up prefabs from a saved dictionary, so that they can be checked or edited. The entries will need to be forwards compatible, so I'll be loading each tile and then translating the indexes to a new array, that way if I add extra indexes or extra info (like traps or puzzles) I'll be able to update existing prefabs to work with the new standard. Click for a video.

Video Diary 8

Things are moving along well, there's been a lot of progress on the action manager side of things. Actions have finally moved to the UI, so you can initiate actions by clicking the appropriate button. I've set up some dummy actions to show what happens visually when actions are taken, but the actual dice rolls and such are yet to be integrated. The UI objects are also being added, though some are non functional or empty at the moment. Click on the image to see this week's development video. Every time I add something big I also add about a dozen small things. Like the selection box visualization. Previously this was using render.drawline, and old fashioned Blender function which can be impossible to see at certain resolutions, or at certain frequencies. I replaced it with a function that adds planes of the right size and scale in the right location. I also made all characters a little bigger. I still need to do some work with vectors and final target locations t...