Moving "@" around the map with the arrow keys.

Yes, that's the stage I'm at now.

However, I do have a functioning level generator going, as well as most of the art assets I'm going to need for the game, so I think I'm in a really good position to move forward.

I can't decide whether to make the movement arrows affected by light. It looks better I think when they fade out on dark levels, I don't want too many bright UI elements in the game, I'm going for that 90's dull and dark look.

There are different arrow icons depending on whether the movement would require walking or running by the player. If you run you can't do any other actions such as drinking a potion, but you can do combat.

I've also made some stand in icons for pick up, fight, read and other actions, until I can get someone to do some 2d design work for the game.

Here's a video of today's progress:

If you are interested in technical details, I can say that the mouse position is detected on the floor, and then a route is calculated to that square it if is walkable and the previous frame didn't also just do that same calculation. Arrows are placed along the route, and then when the route changes a script sweeps through and culls any objects which have the property shared by all navigation icons.

If you have a valid route and you click the left mouse button the controller changes states and moves the player along the route deleting squares from the route as it goes (this would be the point that foot prints could be added as each square is traversed and deleted from the route). When the route is empty it changes states back to the route picker script.

When more player characters are added you'll be able do select them and do the same. As you move, your max movement points will be used up, then you have to skip to the next round to get them refilled.

Comments

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...

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