Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Really need a name for this thing...

Since my last post, I've been implementing the UI that Terri designed. With games where team orders are important it gets pretty tough to keep the interface easy to understand while still keeping it from getting cluttered but I think we've got something that'll work. We'll release an alpha version within the next month and get everyone's feedback on it before we move too far ahead with the other features.


After some discussion with Terry, we've decided to modify one aspect of the game slightly. Dungeons will no longer be completely randomly generated. Instead, we will define custom templates for zones that will determine how a zone looks, what creatures and loot it contains as well as which heroes can spawn in it. This will make it easier to give zones a unique feel and create quests that feel real. For those of you who have played MUDs before, this is the kind of effect we'd like to go for with zones. The location of zones in the world, which zones appear in a world and the layout of dungeons will still be randomly generated though, nothing has changed there.

Next, I'll be starting work on enemy AI. Hopefully, after the weekend, enemies will be roaming around (alone or in groups) and attack you on sight. They will also pursue you / flee based on a set of randomly generated characteristics.

2 comments:

  1. Turning out quite nicely! Will this be turned based per move, or like the online rouge game mangband (being online, mmo, turn based is not an option). Keep up the awesome work!

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    1. Funny you should ask. I started writing the AI this week and we sort of hit a wall.

      Since you control a bunch of characters, real-time isn't really an option. Turn-based however has its own problems: mainly the fact that it bogs down the UI and makes turns a bit tedious. I.e. some characters use their turn to move, some will attack, some will skip a turn, some will move a bit but still have a few steps left. All things that add to the complexity of a turn.

      So we're rethinking the team-based aspect of the game. I'll post something this weekend on which direction we're taking and I'll most likely have a pretty new screenshot to showcase something I've been wanting to implement for a while now.

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