Pickledtezcat Game Devblog

 I've been working on a new project this month. It's a serial point and click adventure, set in a familiar universe. It's going to be a non-profit project, to stand as a showcase for everything I've leaned in game design and programming. The setting will help to make it more visible.  This was a tactic I used with some success in the past, when I made a battletech fan game. The number of views and downloads for that game were roughly ten to twenty times higher than for any of the games which I made based on my own ideas and settings. I'm going to be able to reuse a lot of assets I originally designed for a previous sci-fi project, so that should save some time. There are going to be new assets, and I've already made some of the characters. There's a story, with an arc which covers a whole season of mini episodes. Godot is a great game engine for this kind of project. Very light weight and easy to use, but with a full set of features. Godot 4 will include an ...

Most of the AI and mission structure is done. It still needs heavy testing, but I'm getting tired of looking at the placeholder terrain, so I'm doing some work on the full terrain. This is the basic "summer" terrain. There's a lot still to add, such as the water part of the shader (where you can see the grey gravel in the above shot) and of course trees, bridges and walls. I'm not sure yet if I want to add modular roads as a different object. That would give them a more solid appearance, but might take more work and be more of a drain on resources. There will be other terrain sets as well, some will feature bigger rocks, and different kinds of trees.

So you want to make some art assets for your game. The first on the list is a Steampunk Revolver for your main character to shoot up Cthulhu with. Quickly opening your internet browser you start with a Google image search. Ah, there is is! A Steampunk Revolver. It might be a good idea to find a few influences so you don't accidentally end up copying a famous design. Another one. Just mash them up and you're ready to go! Off to your favorite modeling program. But wait! isn't there more to building a strong design concept than that? Actual 19th Century Revolvers. Of course there is. One of the diseases of modern design is that of recursion. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. This is especially a problem with "historical" concepts. Over the course of that recursive process the concept becomes infected with modern design elements, and ends up looking very similar to everything else that anyone else has ever made. If you want to come up wit...

I finished working on the code for adding foliage and having some extra time I decided to experiment with the code for rockets. The original idea I had was that rockets would be large vehicle components that can be fired very quickly, regardless of how much manpower is used for reloading. They would use up a lot of ammo, so they would run dry after a short but devastating barrage. The problem here is that it's easy to take advantage of this by adding a lot of ammo, which is much smaller than in bulk than the rockets. There's also the problem of firing large caliber rockets. In real life rockets of up to 30cm were used, but I think that will be too powerful for the scale of combat in this game. lol. Somehow that one trooper survived the mother of all explosions... A 30cm rocket could contain nearly 30KG of explosive. That would be a very large explosion. I've tried to balance the game by using a simple equation to make bigger guns more powerful, but h...

I've started work adding trees back in to the game. They look nice already with the mipmaps turned off. I think I've got the color match with the ground for summer trees. The trees have a "shadow only" object which helps reduce rasterizer usage and match the shadow with the lamp. I'm not 100% happy with the trees right now, but I hope they will get better as I make more of them and refine the textures a little. I really don't want to waste any more time just fiddling with them. In a few days I'll take another look and see if I can see where the problem is. I think maybe the ground color is too uniformly light. It needs some more dark areas and contrasting sections. I decided to go with the hollow health bars, I like the effect. More than the black bars. I've also finished adding recoil and other physical effects to the vehicles. Even the guns move, with the main gun swiveling to track the enemies. It also tilts for range if it is a suppo...

Telling a story; Creating a Compelling Narrative. In this blog I will talk about my own recent brush with story telling and go on to talk about how tools from creative wring can help you to better author the narrative in your games, whether they have a traditional linear narrative or a procedurally generated interactive narrative. Narrative and structure in traditional fiction    last week I started writing a story set in the world I'm developing for my game Vinland: 1936. I hope the story will help me to flesh out my game world and develop my own expanded universe which will be a good place to set my games in the future. After about a week of work, on and off I've progressed the story to outline stage. For each character thread I have half a dozen chapters which plot a course through the events of the story. Each thread is told from the perspective of a different character. Actually I started writing as soon as I had my outline, but I've since gone back an...

I did a stress test with infantry yesterday: The important bits to look at are "Logic" which is the performance of my python scripts and "Rasterizer" which is how long the scene takes to render. At this point with around 375 infantry men in the scene Rasterizer is proving a much bigger drain on resources than Logic. In fact Logic costs are really very low indeed. They'd have to double again before you'd get a loss of frame rate from 60fps. That's great news! Some other things I worked on this week: Adding the code for units to use binoculars. This allows you to see further but with a limited field of view. Good for scouts or officers. Began working on artillery units. For now they work almost exactly like vehicles, the infantry modes are just static meshes. I hope to make them a kind of hybrid unit with mesh guns and sprite crews. But for now they work like this. The have to be deployed before use, and stowed for transport. This ...

Today I did some work on the mini-map. It's working great. Later I'll be using some textures to make it look better, but for now it's just in the testing phase. You can already see that it shows the location of friendly units and their viewing range. Line of sight is currently dealt with as a radius only. I've thought of using obstacles to block sight but I think it's one of the things that was really unpopular with the original blitzkrieg. When an enemy was shooting at you but you couldn't see it to shoot back or even guess where it was. Very realistic, but also highly annoying. I think there's going to have to be a compromise. If something is far beyond your line of sight, you can't see it (though it might see you). If something is blocked by a building, you might see it, but can't shoot it. You need to get a direct line of sight. I'm also thinking of making out of range or blocked units invisible but represented by a question ma...

Starting work now on the UI for the game. I need to get on with this as it's going to handle controls for things like changing infantry formations, giving orders to your units, targeting and combat etc... Here's an early version of the UI command buttons: The commands will also be accessible by hotkey. For example the first 4 are A, S, D, F: 1. Attack, 2. Sentry, 3. Defend and 4. Flank. These will set the overall state of the selected units. Attack will make the unit move to the selected destination or enemy, trying to shoot whenever possible. Sentry will go in to observation mode and for infantry they will go prone. Tanks will open their hatches to get a better look around. They won't attack unless first attacked, and will get a better visual range in this mode. You can use the ambush mode as well (second row, number 6), in which case they won't get the visual bonus, but will be harder to spot. Defenders will try to turn automatically to face the nearest...

Although the roguelike project was going well I had a few issues with some parts of the code, and the sheer size of the project was something I could see stretching away in front of me for years with no guarantee that people would actually want to play it when it's finished. It's time to try something a little less ambitious. I'm going full rogueLITE! Using a lot of the code from the roguelike project, I started making a more limited game. There will be a single character, combat will be more arcade like, there will still be a chance to upgrade and develop your character's stats, but they represent only a single class and have fixed equipment. Introducing the Lady Grenadier. I've got a fun character, an interesting setting and an exciting story lined up. It still utilizes my low poly style, but things are going to be a little more cartoony. Game play involves mostly chucking bombs at the enemy. Bombs away! But there's also a lot of platformin...

I'm currently working on the inventory and items system. I've got a good idea of how it's going to work, and I've made a few test demos in blender so I know how it should fit together, but one area I had some trouble with is how to make the items more interesting. I don't want to have just sword +1, necklace of AC +5 etc... I want items to feel like they are unique. So I'll be designing a few base item types and then having them generate some qualities. [Real weapons have character!] The first quality is status. An old broadsword, or a rusty helm. Or spoiled meat. These will be limited by item type, so you don't end up with rusty meat or rancid chain-mail. They add a modifier to elements of the item's stats, either a positive or a negative modifier. The second quality is wear and tear. This is more dynamic since it can change, as you take or deal damage. This might not be seen in the item's name, but rather in a status bar or something. ...

A lot of work this week, but you can't really see any of it. I've been setting up the interface between the player and all the controls. Now I have a way of entering any kind of command I need in a way which is (IMHO) pretty easy to get to grips with. Here's the early concept: [radial menu with two levels] This was my first concept, that you would use the radial menu to switch to a non-game state and from there you could use direction keys and space to set up various parts of the game. But I thought it would be better if the radial menu could be expanded with multiple layers to handle things directly in game without entering a non-game state. So now you can control the camera, perform actions and feats, give orders, switch characters, set default AI behavior and other things right in the game. [8 level radial menu] And all layers lead back to the main layer, so hopefully you can't get lost in the menus. Some interactions though still need to enter ...