Experimentation

I had a few minutes today, so I've played around a bit with the idea of creating graphics that look like they are hand-drawn or sort of cartoon-like in nature.  Some people think it could add to the abstraction of the game.  I'm not sold, but here's a screenshot anyway.

Not sure that this works.

I guess when the realism becomes too high, there are certain expectations...and in order to reduce the expectations, I have to reduce the graphic quality?  Yeah, that confuses me too...

Graphic Update

I got some feedback regarding the screenshots I uploaded last time.  A couple of people indicated that they didn't care for the way that the graphics were done.  I had a few days to think about it and decided to approach them a different way.

For comparison, here's what the NPC interaction looked like originally:

Also pay attention to the dialogue, which changes dramatically in the next screenshot as I tightened it up somewhat.

I liked it when I first worked with it.  But, after a while, I realized it didn't sit right with me.  So, thanks to RPG Watch forum user "Sacred_Path" and a few users on RPG Codex, I got pointed in a different direction.  This is where the graphics are headed now:

A lot easier on the eyes, I think.

Anyway, feel free to leave feedback about it.  Making mistakes is just a part of the process.

Quest Systems

I mentioned in my last blog post that I had started work on some of the exploration and quest systems in the game.  As I explained in that post, I have no idea of which systems I might need until I need them (aside from the combat system, naturally).  There's a lot of things that I can't work on until I see how they're all going to work together.

I suppose that means that I'm flying by the seat of my pants on the development of this game, but it's not much different than working on a piece of art anyway.

Since I'm working on the quest system, I figured it was time to go ahead and share some screenshots of what adventuring in "Lands of Adventure" might look like:

Interacting with someone in the town.

Obviously, a CRPG with story elements is going to need a way to talk to NPCs.  The above picture reflects what talking to an NPCs might look like.  Anyone who has played old-school CRPGs will recognize that this is pretty similar to how the Gold-Box games handled dialogue.

But, if I want the dialogue to be more than just straight narrative prose, I have to allow the player an option to roleplay and to make decisions.  So, enter the branching choices:

I'm picking the first answer, but that doesn't mean that I don't want to pick the third one.

CRPGs have evolved a lot over the past 25 or so years.  This game, I hope, will represent the best things about old-school adventuring while bringing in some of the modern ideas that make a game a little more interactive.  In older games, you didn't get as many branching options as you do in today's games.  I'd like to think that was due to limitations of memory and disk space, and less of a design decision.  It's my belief that the game can still be considered to follow the style of old-school and still include this kind of convenience.

Finally, plots aren't always advanced by talking to NPCs.  Sometimes, things happen, or the PCs see something.  Or, maybe they find important notes...like this one:

MMMmmmm....assassination....

There should be a lot of options for players to get involved in things, or to miss things completely.  For example, this note was found buried in the mud.  It's possible a player might miss it and never find out about it...or they might decide to do something besides get involved in whatever is going on.  And I think they should have that choice.

And who knows...maybe someone will ask them to clean some rats out of a basement somewhere...but at least it won't be their only choice.

Starting Town

I've reached the point in game development where I've started to throw some of the maps together.  That's because I don't know every system I'm going to need in the game until I actually build those parts of the game.  I can't guess in advance.

So, there's not really much to share in regards to features (as most of the systems behind the scenes would sound pretty boring if I described them).  However, here are some cool screenshots of the starting town...

One of the entrance gates.

Looking toward the well in the center of the town.

Near the well.

I'm fairly happy with the way it's starting to come together.  And comparing these screenshots to the early version of the game is night and day.  I'll keep you updated.

Leaps and Bounds

With each passing day, the game becomes more of a reality.  Whether I spend a day knocking out a single complex system or find time to hammer out five or six different things, it all leads to one thing...progress.  I find that as long as I continually move forward on a project, I eventually get to the end.  It's the best advice I can give to someone who is working on anything.  Just keep working and you'll get to where you're going eventually.

As for this game, there are a lot of new things, but not all of them are things that allow me to show screenshots.  Still, there are a few things to show off since last time.

Even though I couldn't salvage the other version of the game due to some strange errors (and I never did figure that mess out), I was able to pull some of my work from that version.  That means that this version now has all 12 classes, skills, perks...etc.

Since I've already shown off the screens where you pick your skills and perks and I don't want to repeat myself, here's a screenshot that highlights what you would see if you examined a character's skills and perks during gameplay:

The "Back" and "Next" buttons allow you to look through the skills and perks of each character in your party with ease.

Of course, starting characters wouldn't normally have six different perks.  1st level characters only get three, but I threw a couple of extra ones onto my test characters just so I could see how they would display.   During the course of the game, a character can accumulate up to eight perks in total.

In addition to the skills and perks, a lot of work has been done with the inventory system.  I've shown the inventory screen previously, so I won't bore you with another shot of that.  Instead, we'll talk about the different things you can do with the inventory.

There are items that you can equip (like armor, swords, shields, boots, helmets, etc), and that functionality is fully in place.  Sometimes, you want to drop something, and you can accomplish that easily enough.  Or, trade it to someone else in the party...and even that can be done without issue.

The hard part was coding the things that can be used.  Things like bandages, which can be used to heal your party.  Or mana crystals, which can be used to recharge the mana of your spellcasters when they can't rest in a hostile environment.

Selecting a character to heal.

In order to assist the player, I have added pop-up windows.  These windows provide feedback or allow the player to make choices.  In the picture above, for example, the player can select which character should be healed with a bandage.

Of course, one thing I always disliked about old-school CRPGs is when you do something that you didn't need to do without realizing it.  For example, drinking a healing potion when you were already healed...or clicking on a character that was already healed and hitting them with a heal spell that they didn't need.

So, I have created safeguards.  If a character is already fully healed (or has full mana, or whatever), the game will actually let you know that you don't need to do that and won't expend whatever item you were trying to use.

This character tried to use a bandage on himself when he wasn't hurt.  What a doofus.

I wish all CRPGs did this, but they don't.  So, that's just the way it goes.  But, with this game I want to be sure that player's don't waste resources on accident.  It happens.  And it sucks when it does.  Hopefully, this will make it suck less.

Finally, after several different revisions, I have come up with a design that I like for the main screen.  Some people won't like it.  They have told me that games shouldn't have character GUIs and that they get in the way...but I think this is only a modern way of thinking.  Old-school CRPGs had character GUIs, so this game will have one as well.

Yes, I created a version at one point where the characters weren't seen and would show up when you pressed the "ESC" key...but if I wanted to build a modern style game, then I would build one.  That's not the kind of game I'm building...so people who don't like it can do something else.  There are plenty of games for them to play.

The text box is not always visible.  It does go away when there isn't text to be displayed.

This is the state of the game currently.  It's coming along well.  I haven't had a lot of time to post here recently.  But, that's probably because I'm spending my time programming instead.

Looking forward to your feedback...

Round and Round We Go

Anyone who reads this blog regularly is probably going to start thinking I've lost my mind, but I have taken a step back again.  This time, I didn't start all over, but I did go back to the version I had been working on previously (the version with 12 classes and perks and skills).  There were a lot of things that prompted this, and I won't explain them all, but the main one was this:

* The new version wasn't working out the way that I wanted it to work out.

It was very restricting.  It took me two months, but I finally remembered why working on the first version in Unity was liberating:  Because I wasn't bound into the same box I had been stuck in back when I created the first version in Visual Studio.  So, going back and trying to get Unity to conform to that box turned out to be a terrible mistake.

I lost two months of time, but I learned some really important lessons.  A lot of them actually.  And, I think going forward, we'll see a lot more interesting things start to happen.  This experience has freed me and cut me loose from the box that I couldn't see around. 

So, I'm taking a step back again...but it really feels like a step forward.  Some of the best lessons are the hardest to learn.

Updated Character Screens

Even though the updates to this blog have become less frequent doesn't mean that progress on the game has stopped.  In fact, I've been working pretty hard.  The problem is that there is very little that can be shown.  Working with code and rebuilding systems from the original version of the game is an essential step...but leads to some very boring blog reading.  I'm sure you don't much care to hear how I revamped the item class objects or worked out the steps to make text print just the way that I want on the screen.  It's interesting to me, certainly, but I'm likely the only one who would find it so.

Still, some progress has been made.  I like to show off the progress to keep those who are interested up to date with how things are coming along.  This time around, I don't have a lot of visuals to show off, but at least I have something to prove that I haven't been sitting on my hands the last month and a half.

This time around, we'll look at the new version of the character screen.  But, before we do that, let's remind ourselves what the old version looked like:

The original character screen in all its glory.

The updated version includes all the same information, laid out in much the same way.  But, it looks a lot nicer.  A whole lot nicer.  Let's take a look:

Updated version.

There's still some work to be done.  The "Continue" button at the bottom shouldn't be showing.  When the character panel loads, it should be turned off.  It's not a broken function or anything, I just haven't coded it yet.  Some of the numbers need to be aligned correctly as well.  They look sort of crooked to me.

I'd like to think that the new, more colorful version of the character screen shows that the game is keeping its roots while updating it's look. 

But, there are many things that can't be seen from just this one screenshot.  Since the last posting, I have updated the number of classes available in the game.  We have gone from four to seven (Warrior, Knight, Scout, Ranger, Priest, Sorcerer, Battlemage). 

Decisions are being made about how to handle the combat in this game as well.  I want to increase the tactical options, but still keep it simple enough that anyone who has played games of this nature will be able to pick it up without a manual or a tutorial.  It's not easy, but ideas are starting to form about how it will all flesh out.

So, if you're following the development of the game, stay tuned.  There will be some exciting stuff coming.