Submissions from 2015-02-26 to 2015-02-27 (7 total)

A submission for Make games. 33

Worked on some basic line of sight today, luckily luxe has raycasting built in, otherwise I couldn't do this:

So I've added mouse support to:

  1. Show a cursor where your mouse (or controller) is
  2. Show a selection when you press and drag your left mouse button, and select the ships when the button is released.
  3. Send units to your cursor when you press the right mouse button.
Pretty standard RTS stuff, but it works nicely!

I'm using my dong2 (https://github.com/josefnpat/dong2/) library to interpret the mouse input, which means it should be super easy to add controllers!

And of course always some juice: Bullet spray.

With all that in mind, check out the demo video for all this on YouTube!

To be honest, this day wasn't a very productive regarding Crystal Kingdom. I wanted to take a little break and had other things that needed to be done.
Tomorrow, however, I will continue making Crystal Kingdom with renewed energy, tons of stuff needs to be done. :)

If you would like to support Crystal Kingdom, please consider liking its facebook page and following it on twitter.
Yesterday's update can be found here.
In a case of any questions or suggestions, don't hesitate to contact me here or on twitter. ;)

Sorry for the essay lol. This is more for me than you ;)

I made it 30 days. Hooray! Thanks to fellow streakers for all the motivation, @Nico for creating this streak, and especially @leafo for a really brilliant idea to help channel creativity.

I have decided to create a schedule going forward of what it will look like to work on a game long term.

  • 30 days of every day updates
  • one day of reflection
  • break until monday, wherever that 30 days ends

In 30 days I definitely experienced some good days and some bad days. There were days that I felt like giving up, and days that I just could not muster any sort of creative energy to look at my code. But I always had in my mind: "I have to make an update to the streak no matter what". I can't say those days were very productive, but I found that almost every bad day was IMMEDIATELY followed by a very productive day in which I accomplished a lot more than I had intended. There is definitely a value in being persistent.

In 30 days, here is a rough outline of the progress I made on a game that I've essentially been sitting on in 2 years

  1. Story
    1. Narrowed down the world the game takes place in a little better
    2. Changed the location of Act 1 and came up with both gameplay ideas and story that fit
    3. I've written some of the opening dialog
  2. Graphics
    1. Widened the view area so that the game works better in widescreen
    2. Built a smoother more engaging camera system
    3. Completed the switch from pygame (software sdl rendering) to sfml (hardware opengl rendering) for a much smoother feel and better framerate
  3. Gameplay
    1. Added picking up and dropping objects
    2. Added interacting with objects in the world
      1. Putting up and tearing down a tent that you can only go in when it's up
      2. Setting traps that stop npcs who cross its path
    3. The ability to run, which uses a slowly refilling endurance bar
    4. Enemies who you can hide from or animals who are afraid of you and run away
    5. Still not sure the direction the gameplay will head, but I know it will be some mix of stealth, story, and timing
  4. AI
    1. A conversation system that will be used in:
      1. Gameplay: Spying on conversations others are having, making story branch choices, or just getting info from people
      2. Cutscenes: Conversations are robust enough to handle most potential cutscene needs
    2. Created some interesting new ai states
      1. A "chase" state that follows somebody as long as they can be seen, with some memory when the object moves out of view
      2. A "flee" state
    3. Used existing behavior tree system to start integrating the different AI states into a single type. All npc currently use the SAME behavior tree now, where before an npc that runs away used it's own tree. Now they choose the right branches in the tree according to their state
    4. Perfected pathfinding, even around a dynamically changing environment
      1. HAHAHA. Just kidding. I did make a lot of progress on pathfinding though.

All in all, I call this a HUGE success. But it's not all rosy. There are some areas, namely in content creation, that are very sorely lacking. The engine work can be done anytime, but without direction in the way of locking down gameplay and story, the project can't really progress. I'm considering taking the engine as is and making a simpler game with it before coming back to this project. I've been playing a lot of Dragon Quest and Final fantasy and it might be really fun to make something more like that, using all of my own art and just being cheesy. Then again, I've come this far - how much more do I really need to do? I'm not even sure, because I don't have a clear idea in my head of what it looks like. I would really like to get some clear direction so I can start making my own art or find an artist, which would make me more comfortable sharing the game outside of the streak. (ScreenshotSaturday for instance) I really think Erik the Errand Boy could go far, but how to get from where I am to where I want to go still looks like a tough mountain to climb. We'll see.

Break begins now, back to work Monday!

I didn't update yesterday, so I lost my streak.

It's only 2 days until I'm supposed to release my game, and it won't be ready, so I'm delaying it to the 7th of March. I'm sorry for making everyone wait longer to play.


On the bright side, I put some new things in my game. Combat works for all characters now, and feels much better.

I also started adding a new robot enemy.

Got a new font (Gidolinya from http://gidole.github.io/), menu state machine improvements, a nice animated, noninteractive red dot in the main menu and xdg-open based Patreon link.

Next step will be modelling a basic cat mesh (or do you guys know any I could use?), building an environment to walk in, and putting that on the screen.

An interactive short story schedules to be published by the first week of March!