Pickledtezcat Game Devblog

In a video game, what is real? This is, strangely, a question that infects many discussions about making games, much more so that those about playing games. Well, some things can be modeled somewhat realistically; ray tracing, shadow casting, physics, real time reflections, on the fly destructible or deformable terrain, goal orientated action planning AI... These are all "realistic" approaches" to making games, or you might say simulation based approaches. Other times people use tricks; pre-baked lighting, animated pseudo-physics, on-rails movement, scripted AI, matcap reflections... These are all cheats, to save development time and processing power. They don't simulate real word physics or behavior but simply try to mimic the results. Players of games are rarely concerned with with such things. Everyone who plays a game knows deep down that it is not real, and they don't expect it to behave realistically. Sometimes they get annoyed with games which show b...

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...

I've been doing some coding, nothing to show right now, but it's essential stuff. You know, the stuff that doesn't show up right away in game, but lays the ground work for actually being able to do stuff like attack and pick things up... As part of that I'm still working towards a working concept for the UI. There's the portrait (1) which tells you which character this is. Next (2) is the stats. Simple outline here, you can get more info by clicking on the portrait, but here you can see health, focus, fatigue and experience. Here (3) is the action buttons. These are contextual and change depending on character or target situations. The target window (4) is an important one. this could be a monster, or it could be some gear on the floor, or a door or another player. You can click here to get more info about it. The available actions will change depending on the type of target. Because you can have multiple characters selected at any one time, I need a way ...

Click the clock to watch Video devblog number 6... Next up I'm going to do a basic hand to hand combat setup to test my combat and stat system. I want a system which allows combat between groups of quite a range of abilities. A group of weak players should be able to take on a single strong enemy. And likewise a large group of weak enemies should be a danger to even a strong player party. I also want there to be an incentive for using different kinds of weapons for different situations. What's the point in getting lots of loot if half of it is worthless? Hopefully some robust testing of the system should see whether it's a good system, and more importantly if it is fun or not.