Pickledtezcat Game Devblog

I added some limbs to the fur cloaks and made a wolf cloak. Now you can be Fred the Dread from the N00b comic . If you've never read the n00b I recommend checking it out. It's an awesome commentary on RPGs and MMORPGs. I sometimes think about going back and redoing the player character models and textures. it's a problem that when you work on a project for a long time that older stuff starts to look bad. Anyway, I think I'd better just keep going with the development, and slate character upgrades for a future version of the game. if I spend anymore time revisiting stuff I've already done then it'll stretch development out even more, and then something else will have to be redone.

I was reading Conn Iggulden's Genghis Khan series this month and had decided to include animal skin cloaks for the Barbarian character archetype. I had forgotten all about it when I saw the trailer for the new Hercules movie with "The Rock" sporting a rather nice lion skin. I decided I needed to make a set right away before I forgot again. Lucky for me I already have a bunch of beastmen so it was a piece of cake to cut down a beastman mesh and re-rig it as a cloak. They are so primitive, and feral. It really gives a lot of character to a model right away. Animal skins may well give a morale bonus or a partial immunity to fear. There's a great bit in the book where Genghis' eldest son fights a tiger and afterwards has the skin made in to a saddle blanket: The two generals rode together down the slope to the valley, comfortable in each other’s presence.     “I have been giving thought to a name for my tuman,” Jochi said.     Jebe looked at him, rai...

Now the prefab builder is finally finished I can begin making prefabs. It's kind of fun, I get to dream up puzzles, traps, little bits of narrative for the game to make it come alive. it'll be more fun once the level builder is working and I can begin navigating around my creations in game. I added some final finishing touches to the way prefabs are handled while saving. Now a border of wall tiles is added to the floor tiles, but the rest of the unfilled area is dig able. That means the tunneler will be able to join prefabs together more closely without leaving a big border around each prefab. Also the prefab is cut down to an array that includes only the area containing walkable tiles. Any empty tiles are trimmed. So a 4x4 prefab will only take up a 4x4 array, not a 20x20 array. Also empty lower levels are cut out and replaced with a [None] array if the prefab is a single level one without stairs. I've included some data with the prefabs in the dictionary to show if i...

One valid 2 level prefab ready to be added to the collection. The prefab builder is done. Had a run in with shallow copy problems at one point. It's something I knew about from a previous project, but completely forgot about this time around. I'll have to check the code for the main game to make sure I've not let the same problem creep in there. Sometimes I forget things just as fast as I learn them! Right now you can save prefabs (as long as they are valid) in to a local dictionary, and then browse through them to edit or just check them out. Once you're happy with what you've got you can save them to an external file. I haven't written any code for loading prefabs from the external store yet, but I guess I had better. If I somehow save a prefab which has an error (the key for a locked door is one the wrong side of the door for example) I'll need to be able to find and delete it from the main store of prefabs. It would probably also be a good idea to ...

A special example of a narrative prefab.  I did some more work on the prefab editor today, I think it's pretty much finished. The latest addition is special events and encounters. These allow me to create narrative sections of the dungeon, for example traps and puzzles. For now puzzles are simple things like find the lever that opens a portcullis gate (a type of door that can't be opened by hand but which does not block vision), or use a hidden door to avoid traps, or find a hidden door to get to a hidden room (which you can see through the bars of a portcullis) or just a simple find the key type puzzle. Can you work out the puzzle above? It has two possible solutions. A narrative prefab like that might take up a big chunk of a level, and wouldn't be that common. Most prefabs will be quite simple and self contained. I can also place guards at a level exit, or even a boss encounter in a treasure room. The events will still be procedurally generated, so that the boss ...

I've already talked a bit about how I'm handling the layout of the new tileset, with offset tiles and overlays and different objects for walls and floors etc... In this post I want to talk a bit about how I make the textures, and what I've learned from the first (partially successful) generation of tilesets. Experiments with using different lighting for tiles and characters. If I wanted I could continue to make the game using the old style of tilesets, they're not that bad, but they just don't satisfy me. I know they could be much better and I've learned a lot in the last 2 years that I'd like to include in a revision of the tilesets. Some of the things I want to consider when making the new tilesets are: Don't make doorways "covered", the doorway area should be open to the sky, otherwise it's difficult to arrange your characters in a doorway, somewhere where combat is very likely to take place. In the MKI tilesets I made the door...

I've been working on adding some new tile types, and redesigning some old ones. I've moved stairs up and down from door type tiles to overlay tiles. As I explained in an earlier post, overlay tiles types can be placed on exiting tile types, inheriting some of the qualities of that tile. A more detailed prefab. With descriptions. Some of the tile types have been successful, while others I'm not happy with.  I wanted to add rounded corners to some rooms, but the result, because of the way the code works, just doesn't satisfy. I'll be dropping them for now, perhaps including them as the base wall type in another tileset. On the other hand, details and decorations are just what I was hoping for. Details can be added to either the floor or a pit. They don't affect movement, and can be used to represent non blocking visual details, such as small pieces of trash, rugs, blood splashes, slime trails, spider's webs etc... on floors. On pits they can be ...