Skip to main content

Reboot.

I took some time away from the project for the last few months. I've been investigating some different things that I wanted to get in to the game, but they needed a lot of experimentation to find the best configuration.

I also toyed with the idea of spinning off a new, less complex project but didn't quite go through with it. I've got a couple of things which are ready for further development if I ever decide to focus on them though.


The first thing I did was to investigate non grid based movement. I know it's a step away from hard core roguelikes, but as well as being faster than grid based movement, it's easier to manage. The experiment was for a RTS game, but most of what I made can easily be reused in the RPG.


 I also spent some time working on particle effects and time control.


I briefly entertained the idea of making the game a real time RPG with the ability to slow down time or stop it altogether to aid with strategy. In the end I'll only be using the ability to pause the game while still moving the camera, something that wasn't possible before. I designed some nice particle effects to use for magic in the game too, including lightning bolt and ray of light type effects. I'll continue to use the above demo to develop more particle effects, it's nice to be able to walk around and see them in action.

Sometimes I wish I could make the game real time, it would make it so much easier to code, but it's not the game I want to make.

Anyway, I'm going to continue using the level generation code I was developing before the break, changes to navigation mean that I'll also be able to include some more detailed set pieces too, which will be non grid based. I'm going to be going back to the drawing board for a while though, working on basic player and enemy movement, doors and inventory management, combat and spellcasting. I want to get in to the meat of the project and not spend too much more time planning.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

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...
7 comments
Read more

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.
6 comments
Read more

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...
3 comments
Read more