Pickledtezcat Game Devblog

It's been a while since i posted any updates. It's not tat I haven't been busy, only that the work hadn't reached a point where it was worth showing. It's been a lot of small incremental changes, building a modular menu system with widgets and buttons, porting over some of my old code for displaying vehicle models etc... This is just a dummy menu at the moment. From here I can set the active profile, manage vehicles for testing and jump right in to an in game testing environment. Each chunk of screen space like this is a widget. It can have a number of buttons. The buttons react to being moused over and clicked. They send a message to the widget to decide how to deal with that interaction. The widget then executes some code and might reset the menu page or load a different one. Clicking manage vehicles loads this menu: I've moved some of the structural elements of vehicles away from components mounted in the vehicle and in to a system of options w...

"What is that ugly mess?" Well, it's a test for a dynamically colored set of items. The original icons were taken from here , a great source of black and white game icons. Very useful if you're planning your project and need some stand it art. The red channel is the grayscale image, the green channel holds a mask for non metallic, non-colored sections, like rope or bare leather. The blue channel holds a mask for dynamic colors. The masked areas can have their input adjusted by a three channel input (RGB) from a material, to control hue, saturation and value. This gives a wide array of different colors meaning that no two items generated by the item generation script should look identical. Here's what they look like when passed through the shader: Ok, still a bit of an ugly mess... I think I need to start with better material than a faked hightmap from a 2 bit image. :) Honestly, I think 2d art is my worst area. I'm probably just going to move ...

I added the possibility of pits or water to the dungeon yesterday: I also added some debugging tools to reveal the map on command. I noticed a room sometimes isn't connected. I think it has to do with adding rooms manually. I'll sort that out as soon as possible. I also have been working on item generation. Sample output from the equipment generator: Perlmurite armor Iron man-trap Broken, cooked eggs Brass handbow Feathered clothes Hollow, corroded, copper hatchet Occult, rare, gyium-leather sandals Rudde-leather cape Oil stained, white-copper ring Enchanted, brewed meat Brewed medicine Perfect, gyium-leather armor Awesome, composite, brass handbow Ivory mace Magical, akkadi-iron greaves Fur choker Old, haldiris greaves Extended, gyium-leather leggings Magical, iron hatchet Magical, perlmurite treasure Light, bronze, narrow hammer Animal-hide shield Occult, gyium-leather belt Blood stained, grubby, iron throwing-axe Magical, gold coins Ruine...

This week I've been fleshing out the dictionaries for my dynamic item generation system. I made a few changes since it was first designed, like simplifying the materials and making them less exotic. Now there are a lot of normal materials (like COPPER and GLASS) and some exotic or magical materials. Items are generated with a number of attributes. Which ones they get depends on the type of object, its quality and its material. Here are a few examples: I think it's going quite well so far, though I'm having to generate a lot of items and check their attributes so I can fine tune the dictionary rules. You can see the "CLUB$1" up there, which is a rare, ivory, toy club. I think children's club would be a better attribute than toy. That sounds strange in some cases. There's a ugly, copper long-sword, which is both blunted and corroded. Items can have several damage attributes, depending on their quality. As they get used in game and pick up...

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. ...

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...

This is actually two short blog posts but I'll roll them together for the sake of brevity. Firstly, BtS , the author of "The ground gives way" brought to my attention a problem with non-google users not being able to comment on the blog. The problem is now fixed and you should be able to post if you want to. I do need some feedback on the game, so please do comment if you've got something to say. if you think something looks great, or terrible, please tell me about it. If you can see me heading for a disaster because I've made a mistake in my code or, a concept I'm chasing is fundamentally flawed, please tell me so I can fix it. Secondly, I've been working on a rudimentary data entry program for my project. A spreadsheet version of a dictionary. Until now I've always used spreadsheets for creating data sets for my games. In the past I've spent hors, days, even weeks hand typing data for everything from global environment settings ...

Although I've tried to focus only on making content, not on fleshing out the game word yet I have had to make some decisions about fluff and flavor. For one thing, priests need some kind of allegiance, until now I had just been using an ankh as a kind of universal holy symbol as many early graphical RPGs did. The Ankh is instantly recognizable as a holy symbol, but old enough to not be part of a current world religion. No one is going to accuse you of blasphemy or anything like that for using it. However, I am trying to add a lot of items to the game right now and I'd rather not have to come back later and add more stuff bit by bit. So I added 5 basic religions. The Ankh of Shishi. The first religious item is the Ankh of the goddess Shishi. It is the key of life, and priests which follow this religion are devoted to life, healing, farming and the Sun. Shishi is widely worshiped in the hot regions of the south and east, but little followed until recently in the temp...

After making some more items for the game I found that the potions I'd made before didn't match at all well with the way items are displayed in the inventory. I've revisited potions, and also made icons for potion ingredients, food, traps, tools and various other things. Food is going to be quite important because it's replacing the rest function. To rest you'll find a quiet area and consume some food. The characters will do a resting animation and their health will be increased. You won't be able to eat if you're too thirsty so you'll need to drink some water or wine before resting. Yummy food, and potion ingredients. You can eat the potion stuff but it has a chance of making you sick so it's not advisable. Because of this you'll have to chose whether you really want to rest or not. Resting because of getting hungry won't happen all that often, if at all but if you get injured a lot you'll start eating up all your rations. Th...

A quick blog today to show off some of the potion models. In game they will have glow or sparkle effects, these are just the basic meshes with textures. I've made 30 unique potions for now. That should be enough to get started with. I've also set up a blend file with all I need to make more types later. The textures are just flat textures, I baked some matcap textures I designed on to a high poly version of the potion mesh. Yummy, and not so yummy potions wait for the player to find... or make. Because the game is going to be a pretty low magic setting, potions will be important. Don't expect to be carrying 30 potions of healing. Each potion you find will have a number of charges, or sips. The potion isn't used up until you've drained it dry.   For now potions are going to be assigned randomly each time you play. Don't expect a green vial to always be a healing potion, because it could change. Eventually I want to set up a fake "chemistry"...

Following on from yesterday's brain storm I'm going to revisit clothing and armor briefly. Before there were four types of armor: Clothes, light, medium and heavy armor, as well as hats and cloaks. I'm going to extend this to add robes, which can essentially be worn over your armor for extra visual distinction. I also added barbarian furs to fill up some of the slots created by adding the separate robes category: New to the catwalk this season, dead animal wear. I may extend these even more to make a whole new category of armor so that barbarians and the like can enjoy visually actuate representation on screen. I kind of hate seeing my barbarian walking around in purple elven chain mail. I've also moved some of the magical armor out to be "unique" armor. There will be unique items in game, very rare and with their own graphics so they feel even more valuable. Magical glowing high level armor! I want to get all the weapons, armor and gear sort...