Codexian Game Development Thread

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Oh, yeah. I didn't really mean roguelike. More like, roguelike minus the random generation, probably minus the field of vision/line of sight as well. Not so much roguelike, lol.

Something simple as in move 4 directions, being able to interact with stuff with simple reaction like printing a string. Then just add, add, add.

Shelter version of Power Armor in motion:

Looks really good Shihonage.

That does look really good. Any chance of getting to see that in in-game action soon?

Shihonage - awesome. So I take it you finally found an artist for Shelter?

The artist and I found each other in early autumn last year, and have been generating Shelter character graphics in background as I try to finish the goddamn Monsterland.

If I knew of him a year earlier, I would've never started with Monsterland.

Videos take time...

This was an old "walking" video for internal testing of new sprite system. The sprite has been changed since then - it's significantly larger compared to surroundings, the edges are anti-aliased now, and the shadow is less... tremendous.

That really is good

Very impressive. I've always wondered how you make pre-rendered sprites like that. This is probably a really dumb question, but do you automate the process or do you have to pose and save each frame individually?

Thank you.

The artist had experience doing this for another project, so he already automated this at least partially. There are separate programs for automating this specific task - breaking down 3D models into series of isometric sprites - but I believe he just made his own scripts for Poser/3D Studio/etc.

Mr. shihonage: How do you time the animation? I mean, given a bunch of sprites of the walking animations, how do you measure how much time does it have to have between each sprite, so the walking looks natural? I'm talking about 2D. I know that in the 3D land this is almost automatic.

Sincerely:

The Frian Bargo.

cboyardee: If you are looking for a low cost solution I heard very good things about Spriteforge: http://www.d-grafix.com/?page=spriteforge

In a nutshell it's very much like the script from shihonage's artist that he mentioned. It can use 3-D models from a variety of format sources and easily spit out 2d versions (including animations). You just have specify the camera angle that fits your games' perspective and you are ready to go.

shihonage

That's a very nice looking walk animation. Not to nitpick but I am curious, are you using different movement animation(s) for combat? That animation looks like someone is just casually walking around (and does a really great job at it) but would look off in combat.

A lot of games in the past that have used the same movement animations in combat and non-combat gameplay have usually not had this issue as much due to the fact that their walk animations weren't all that great (unlike the one you have here) or they walked around as if in combat mode all the time.

My guess on this one is that due to the nature of the armor (extrem heavy power armor), the movement itself wouldn't change that much during combat - maybe different positions for the arms because the character has a weapon equipped.

Hey Frian, how's LandWaste 1/2 going?

My artist pointed out that on his end the animations look a bit different due to custom pausing (frame duplication) in his test software. Yet the animation handler on my end is written from scratch, and right now the custom timing is hardcoded, and used mostly for manhandling the "fire" animations, not walking.

The system may need to be upgraded later to read custom timing files. Or not.

I am not really concerned about this because:

a) I am very much leaning toward going back to TB combat, because while the PwRT system right now "looks" slick (and never requires reflexes), the Codex has educated me on just how much more character stats and player thinking can be infused into a TB system. In TB combat, it's more akin to moving the chess pieces around, and who cares if they walk "relaxed".

b) A lot of shit in TB combat will [be allowed to] speed up to comical levels, just like people did with Fallout1/2 speed slider, so it will not really look "dignified" or "proper" anyway. I may switch it to "run" animations in that mode to make it look less awkward, though.

c) This kind of artist (someone mature/experienced, as opposed to enthusiastic and erratic) is not cheap, and I've been skimping on animations. There are less animation states than in Fallout - no breathing, no head scratching, no weapon holstering. Weapon holstering and most "interactions" (with control panels, or stealing) are handled via "fiddle" animation. There are no ultraviolent deaths either, which saddens me a bit. I may have to draw them myself, likely in 2 directions only (West, and then mirror it to the East).

If I had Fargo's money (or Fallout's budget), or maybe if I was insane and was willing to blow all my savings, I'd be able to load the artist to the point of replicating Fallout's graphical richness. As it stands, I'm just glad to have the few major armor types multiplied by their "walking with weapon" and "firing weapon" animations for several Fallout-like weapon types.

We'll also be doing some scenery and monsters, and I will be attempting some procedural tricks in the renderer, to create the illusion of higher graphical diversity than there really will be.

So I began work on a more serious project (meaning the beginning of an actual game and not just conceptual shit) last night and have been working on it through today.
Of course chances of me making anything out of it are quite slim but I actually feel pretty good about this one (for now)
Fairly simple concept while being deep enough to be fun to design. Also pretty easy to code and wont need incredible assets to be fun.

Ive been playing conquest of elysium and although its fairly fun i always find myself thinking i could have done it better so I thought I may as well try some shit out. Right now the big inspirations (aka things i plan on ripping off) are CoEIII, Chaos Overlords, HoMM series and dominions with a pinch of roleplay. Wont get into detail unless I actually think I'm going to take it for a stretch.

Anyways I have this pathetic showcase: http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1332384568

Mock main menu.. the blob is a button.. pressing it creates a random map (VERY random). Doubleclicking a sector opens up the sector view. Like Chaos Overlords you can move to neighboring sectors by doubleclicking as well. Blob here is a button that brings you back to the map screen.

whoever can find the bug gets a free brofist. Anybody who has used flash shouldnt have much trouble

doesnt look like much (again) but i have the basics of my architecture down and some important things will be shit easy from here on out. wish me luck

Still working on tile/map/collision/pathfinding systems. But progress has been made. Also, the animation system is about 80% done. I've had a pretty busy week, so I've been working on some sprites when I can just manage a few minutes here and there. This little guy is a work-in-progress, but two out of his four walking directions are fully animated. They need some tweaking, but you can tell he's walking (or at least I can). The furthest right is probably the size he'll be in the game (if he makes it). After a few practice sprites, I'd like to make some templates so I can just throw whatever clothes/armor/gear on them and be done with it.



If the sprite doesn't give it away, the game (if it makes it this far) will be in a late 19th century frontier-like place. But with an undetermined number of fantasy elements.

you've been outed as a Boston Bruins fan. GO CANUCKS!!

edit: I should add, sprite looks really good. How are you handling animation in XNA?

Yeah thats some pretty nice pixel art for an amateur. I have never been able to do jack shit

Today i worked on the architecture surrounding the addition of game content including assets and game mechanical things.

In my game there are sectors (the squares on the map) and Sites (Buildings, shrines you name it) that help define a sector (very much like the sites in Dom3 only more important to gameplay).

Ive come up with a system using typedefs (like a structure in c#) that allows me to add anything with such ease now that I wont have a problem adding a lot of things (hate it or love it im a kitchen sink guy)
Examples:

Code:

    public static inline var SECTOR_PLAINS : TileDef =
    {
        tilesheet        : SECTOR_TILESHEET,
        tileRect        : new Rectangle(0, 0, 64, 64)
    }

Code:

    public static inline var FOREST : SectorDef =
    {
        name        : "Forest",
        description : "An area composed mostly of lush forests.",
        tile        : TileDefinitions.SECTOR_FOREST
    }

Code:

    public static inline var GOLD_MINE : SiteDef =
    {
        name        : "Dwarven Mine",
        description : "A mine of the dwarves. Adds gold, iron and gems to your faction every turn",
        tile        : TileDefinitions.SITE_GOLD_MINE,
        effects    : [INCREASE_GOLD(200), INCREASE_IRON(5), INCREASE_GEMS(1)]
    }

So to add anything i basically just add one of the blocks. Everything is just a placeholder/tester btw. Nothing concrete enough has been thought out to actually create any of these things for use in the game (that i will never Finnish anyways ) but the idea is to give an idea of what i have planned

No idea why I'm posting this here. I guess knowing that people are reading it gives me a psychological push towards completing it :p

Dragging this post up from a while back, but could you elaborate on this point?

For my project I was planning a talent tree system, sort of like a cross between the witcher and arcanum. There are skills and they each have 5 ranks, and you purchase each rank with talent points you get from levelling up. Each skill can also have a number of secondary feats available at each rank with you can get with those same talent points, and you vary how many talent points each one costs. An example would be the dodge skill, which could have associated feats like one that gives you a bonus to evade traps, and one that gives you a better chance of escaping attacks of opportunity in combat. Or the sword skill which comes with stuff like disarm feats and so on. The point being that there is bunch of stuff like tumble, disarm and uncanny dodge etc where you don't just want to fold them into another skill but they're aren't really important enough to have a whole scale to themselves.

The other aspect is that it is generally clearer for the player what they are getting for their choice. This is particularly the case for skills which mainly play a role in dialogue checks. E.g in the Age of Decadence demo I made an assassin who only really invested in 4 skills and put 40 points into lock-picking, but only encountered one instance where I could use the skill and the check needed 41, which is a bit annoying and tends to encourage hoarding and save-reload behaviour. I suppose the trick is to design a system where the 1-100 scale is more meaningful but I'm not sure what that would involve in many cases.

Well, the problem is really two things, though from what you describe we're only looking at one of them.

One of the problems with talent trees in many games is that they are used to hold unlockable abilities. These tend to change the very essence of an RPG. Instead of having numbers that determine how good a character is at the various possible interactions in a game, the abilities themselves are the interactions. This makes characters far less comparable to one another, and it makes it far more tricky for the player to cope with opposing characters who have abilities the player hasn't even seen or tried out. Furthermore, it makes it tricky for the developers to implement large scale game mechanics that affect each character to varying degrees. If a game relies purely on an ability/talent tree and does away with numerical statistics entirely, the developer has nothing to work with in terms of, for example, altering the cost of items based on the customer. Developers have to scale back on the number of formulae that can be used on all character in favour of formulae attached to unique abilities that a character can either have or not have. In other words, numerical statistics aid simulation far better than unlockable abilities.

The second problem, which is more applicable to you, is the tree itself and whether it's advantageous to structure progression in such a way. What trees do is linearise progression. Requiring one thing to get another thing may be appropriate if it matches up with real life skill requirements, but in a lot of games it tends to be very arbitrarily put together, though mostly in games with unlockable abilities like Diablo II. Instead, I think there's almost always a more appropriate way to go about structuring progression. Mixing up training, use-based levelling and point allocation while having very shallow hierarchies (such as spells inside spell schools) tends to be far more appropriate for most games than deep hierarchies.

Next iteration: inventory gui

Before:
-> http://h11.abload.de/img/800x_zero_25_03_2012-t9kv7.png

Funny outtake (tried to set a new max value for armor slot icons, changed the wrong constant)
->http://h11.abload.de/img/800x_zero_25_03_2012-xrjy9.png

After (WIPy)
-> http://www.abload.de/img/800x_zero_26_03_2012-fqke9.png

Feels better already =)

http://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/dbz-rpg.70644/