Project Lemonade November Update

It's been a while since posted here. I've moved from Blender Game Engine to GODOT, and I've started a new project.

The proposal for Project Lemonade is in an earlier blog post, so I won't go back to talking about that.

Here's a quick overview:

~~Solar city~~ (Project Lemonade) will be a non-violent game designed with the intent of making people think about ways to regenerate their communities in case of coming social breakdown. It is inspired by Solarpunk.

I haven't made massive progress yet, because I've had to learn a whole new game engine. However, I have already taken some steps towards a working prototype. I've got a controllable character in the game, plus a working tileset system (GODOT has a great tileset feature), and also some simple AI agents, just wandering around for now.

It's not very impressive yet, (all the assets are placeholders, just while working on functionality) but it feels great to have finally moved on from the BGE and to be trying new stuff. Ever since they announced that the game engine would be cut in Blender 2.80, I've been trying to decide what to do next.

My friend Jacob Merril has been doing great work on making UPBGE compatible with Blender 2.8, and there's a couple of other game engines which are being integrated... but they all lack something which GODOT has, which is cross platform access. I can make a GODOT game which runs natively on the web, and have it connected with the same game running in Android.

The idea of creating a cross platform asynchronous multi-player environment is really an appealing part of this project.

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 A newer version of the tileset with a lot of variant parts for making more interesting rooms.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