Good day, everyone. I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted so I figured I’d write a quick one to let everyone know where I’m at.
The design of the game has gone from strategy RPG, to strategy/action RPG, to action RPG and now, I think, back to strategy RPG. At least something’s been consistent, but we still don’t know what shape it’s going to take.
Now that things are moving along somewhat well on the tech side, it’s time to jump back into design so we can actually figure out what this game is going to be. Some of you may recall that I’ve been trying to work on a strategy RPG for some time now, and that was going to be the genre of this project as well, but that has changed. The reason for this being the absolutely gorgeous Banner Saga which is being developed by small team, big talent indies at Stoic Studio. We pretty much had the same idea in doing an old norse SRPG, but they beat us to the punch by miles.
Here’s a quick video of my world editor in progress. This is just the map editing portion. A video will be coming soon of the character editor portion.
You might, but probably not in the same context.
Over the past week I’ve managed to complete my sound management system utilizing SDL_mixer. Everything is working pretty nicely with that. I decided to use channel grouping so this way I can easily split up sound & voice channels. Music is loading and playing perfectly. Not too bad with the little amount of time I’ve had recently. I’d show you a screenshot, but that would hardly make sense.
In other news, I may have a couple of programmers coming on board for a little extra help. I’m optimistic that this will help move things along a little bit, at least getting the rest of the framework nailed down. I’m also looking to have a company logo done rather soon, which is pretty exciting. I feel like good things are on the horizon.
Not a very big update this time around, but I should have some more to talk about soon and possibly some pre-pre-pre-alpha screenshots/videos of things in ‘game’.
Thanks for stopping by =)
So, I’ve spent most of my recent dev time working on my editor suite. So far, I have a level & entity editor working, and my levels saving & loading into the game engine. I do have some upgrades to make to the level editor to allow for tile properties & adding objects/entities, but other than that, things are going relatively well. I figured I’d post a couple screens of my progress so at least I can document a bit of where I am and where I need to go.
Entity & Level editors:
They’re nothing special at the moment, but they’re coming along decently well. My current task list is as follows:
I’ve got a bunch of work ahead of me, but I may have another coder jumping on the project soon, which will hopefully get some of this stuff done a lot quicker than if I was on my own.
I’m also going to be looking for art soon, so if you or someone you know might be interested in doing some art, pixel or hand drawn, drop me a comment on here, Twitter @MetrognomeGames or email it to MetrognomeGames AT gmail DOT com (anti-spam, you know the deal).
Thanks for dropping by and hopefully I’ll have something more for you to read in less than a month this time… -_-
I read a G+ post the other day when searching for random posts about game design where the poster was observing how the level up process in a lot of games is more work than fun and stalls the game flow. I definitely agreed so I figured I’d post and go over some of the ways leveling was done in the past and how we can change it to be more fun.
I haven’t had too much time to work lately, but I’ve gotten a couple things done when I’ve had a free moment or two at work. I’ve recently completed integrating pixel perfect collision for entity vs. entity and entity vs. tile, as well as some basic acceleration physics for entity movement. My current fight is now with how to do proper collision detection & response for tiles, as I’m no longer thinking that pixel based is really the way to go.
A tip from @PlaySnack on Twitter has led me to the N tutorials for separating axis theorem, which looks like it should work for me, but maybe not so much for arbitrarily varying height on a tile. I might end up doing this, and limiting tiles to certain degrees like 30/45/60 so I can build a proper convex collision shape out of them on the fly. While not as elegant as I would like, I think my current knowledge of math/physics is more suited to SAT, which is rather easier than what I’ve been trying to pull off. Combining SAT with custom hit boxes per animation and responding by utilizing the character’s width centers on the colliding axis should give me mostly realistic results. This will give me a little also allow me to do a little bit of “sink in” for certain sides
I think I’ll try to pull a late night this weekend so I can get this collision in and start having the player move along the world. Coming up along with proper world collision will be jumping & gravity. I might have something resembling a game rather soon. Then it’s on to proper game loop & states.
As always, thanks for reading and see you soon!
I’ve spent a bit of time over the past week nailing down some of my technical quandaries and have begun to develop a nice chunk of code. My initial work has been on my level editor and it’s coming along rather nicely. I currently have the ability to load up a tile palette, paint tiles on an SDL screen in C# WinForms, delete tiles, and select them as well. Selecting currently doesn’t do anything, but it will once I add in collision setup and flag/property declaration.
I’ve begun working on my tile engine and I’m trying to brainstorm a way to properly cache my tiles for multiple use.
The basic (wrong) way I’ve created my previous unfinished tile engines has been to create a 2D array of tile objects, then create them based on arbitrary loaded data. I’m looking to go a bit more memory conservative this time. Let me lay out my thoughts and maybe one of you readers can give me some feedback on what you think and how I could possibly change this to make it better.
When it comes to thriving video game economies, one’s mind almost always gravitates towards the MMO genre. Players harvest, craft & loot their way to a fortune using the respective auction house systems. Any given day, you can probably go on any of these games and find the items you want for a variety of different prices. If you’re into economies & making it rich off of other peoples’ work, this is a prime market for you. But, what about those who don’t really dig the whole MMO bandwagon and want something a little more.. single player?
