Pickledtezcat Game Devblog

It's been a while since I posted here. I worked hard on Vinland; 1936 and got a playable demo up and running. But there were quite a few problems with it. I could have continued with the project as it was and finished adding all the art resources, but the game seemed so flawed that it just wasn't worth the effort. So once again I'm starting out from scratch. This time I'm going to be taking on board some gameplay elements that I've picked up from some other games I've played recently. I'm also going to avoid adding any art until the gameplay is all finished. For now I'm using some stand in assets that I created this afternoon; With luck I should be able to get the game to a playable state quite quickly. This time I'm going to get testers to try it out before spending any time on art assets.

I spent a total of about 4 hours trying to find out why my map wasn't displaying properly. Turns out there was nothing wrong with my code, or my shader, the problem was in the imprecision of the floating point numbers used to scale the UVs and the default use of sRGB color space by blender. (top left) This is similar to what I was getting, obviously not right, but I couldn't figure out why.   (top right) Using data from the map each square is given a red color from 0-255. (bottom left) There are 16 possible arrangements of tile and the red color offsets the UVs of that tile by a set amount. (bottom right) The rather unimpressive final base result. When scaling UVs Blender avoids imprecision in floating point number by just rounding up to a more suitable number, so 0.0625 becomes 0.063. This is fine usually, as you don't really care about pixel perfect placement in most applications. But when your total image is only 32 pixels across it can cause issues as 1 divid...

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...

This week I did a whole bunch of work on commands, so the AI players can be better guided by the player. I've also added speech above the NPCs so they can respond to your commands and you can get additional info about what you're asking them to do. For example if you ask them to walk, it says "Look out for secret doors and traps!" Which is what walking is for. [You can also see the new doors] Some other improvements: If you push against an NPC (because of being stuck and wanting them to move out of the way) you will send a message to all the other NPCs to increase their distance from the player for a short time. This stops the situation where one NPC further down the line is blocking but is not too close to the player so doesn't know they need to move. You can urge them to attack or follow you. This will set their follow distance and their engagement distance. You can also set this independently for each NPC. You can ask them to wait behind. Again you...

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 ...

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 b...

One thing which has been a cornerstone of my development framework so far has been Large Monster Implementation (from this point referred to as LMI). It's something that I've said I wouldn't give up on. So as it became increasingly likely that LMI wasn't going to work, or was going to have to require two completely different movement and combat systems working in tandem I became a little downhearted. A giant spider, and look, it really is GIANT! I had built my level prefabs to include a two square wide door, specifically to allow plus size monsters. Many of the monsters I had already designed had small and large variants. It was a real downer. Anyway, my original plan was to have two sets of tile data, one for small tiles and one for large. I would keep track of movement in both, and then share data between them. it was horrible complex to try and code, and I just gave up, just trying to work around the issue on other things that I could actually do. Today ...

After several weeks I've finally got back on the project. I spent some time on another game which may help supply some graphical effects later, as well as perhaps speeding up loading time, if I can work out the bugs. Anyway, I also spent some time playing some classic D&D games to get a feel for what's good and bad about the genre. Temple of Elemental evil. Short and sweet, one of my all time favorites, it has its flaws but I really enjoyed it. It still looks really nice too, but I could wish for more kinds of weapons and armor. Baldur's gate. Perhaps it's because the original was designed for a low res monitor, but I couldn't really like this one visually. The backgrounds are nicely rendered, but the big glowing circles surrounding the players were too intrusive, and the method of showing player damage was horrible. Some things I want: Characters who are easy to differentiate on screen and have personality. That means having some ite...

I've been thinking of how the game should start, even at this early stage of development, I need some eye candy. If I want to get people involved in the project there has to be something which grabs their attention from first opening the game. So I made the adventuress. She's not quite as I first conceived her, She was going to be a lot more medieval, but I ended up taking the base character I was working on and using it for a pirate based art competition with sketchfab and Blender artists forum. After that i adjusted the character slightly using some of the props i created for the still life which will serve as a submenu background. I think she shows the idea of mismatched armor, jewels, interesting equipment and toughness which I want to show in my project. I didn't want to make a girl in a chainmail bikini. This is a tough adventurer, ready to go further in to the deadly labyrinth. I haven't posted for a while because I'm kind of stuck. There's...