2017 TOTDD Video Diary 2

For anyone who's interested in the newest version of the game you can see the current video diary here:

I'm very happy with the atmosphere of the game so far. I feel like it's something I can work with.

I've got a lot of ideas for the game, but for now I'm just going to keep slogging away trying to get a working gameplay demo.

The schedule so far is:

1. Item generation.
2. Basic player stats.
3. Inventory management.
4. Moving items between the screen and the inventory.
5. Using items to attack and trigger events.

I'm going to be working a lot with messages this time around. That should clear up many of the hurdles I was facing in past versions of t he game.

One problem I had before is that I had to complete both player mechanics, and enemy mechanics simultaneously. A player attacked a monster causing damage directly, the monster had to process that damage and so on.

With messages, I can just send a message and forget about it. It doesn't matter that the monster isn't processing it. I can work on player mechanics in isolation before bringing in working enemies.

Same with items, everything can be built as an empty framework of send and receive messages, then the message processing routines can be filled in.

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 A newer version of the tileset with a lot of variant parts for making more interesting rooms.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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