Ludum Dare 26

Sadly, another LD has drawn to an end. I'll be back with a detailed post mortem in a few days but until then, you can try out my game, Spellflinger, here.

Wherefore art I?

With Ludum Dare around the proverbial corner, I finally picked up Pyxel Edit and started making pixel art. I've always been into art but I've never sat down and done something about it. Well, with Big Bad Wofl v2.00, all that has changed.

As it turns out, drawing things is hard and this simple fact became painfully clear when I realized I couldn't draw a pixel rock to save the life of an entire village populated only by small elves who all answer to the name Blork and fill their lives with weaving baskets out of their own beards.

But I pushed through. At the moment, all of my art  is based on (read: copied from) inspiration I get from other pixel art but hopefully if I do this long enough, I'll develop some form of skill.

Calling things I make 'art' feels really pretentious...

What have I been doing?

Terri has gotten quite busy with work and as a result, we haven't made any progress on the game. For those of you who don't know, Terri is the artistic counterpart of Big Bad Wofl. In the previous post I mentioned that we hit a stumbling block and to move on we need to rethink a few things.

In the interim, I have been preparing for Ludum Dare by speedcoding small games in Unity. Here's a screenshot of a tower defense type game I'm working on at the moment:

This is how my games look when Terri doesn't do the art...

I also realized that I haven't told you all about my other website yet. I started a website to showcase devblogs as I realize how much time people put into writing their blogs. Go have a look:

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.