Tada, new project. again.
This time I’m working on an arpg first person dungeon crawler maybe open world type game. Something in the vein of Ultima Underworld.
Something with a 3d first person view but with plenty of UI stuff chonked next to it, like this (from Ultima Underworld):
screenshot of Ultima Underworld

The way I see it, this screen has a few basic parts:

a set of action buttons on the left the 3d first person view with a compass, some animated aligator/dragons and enemy health meter gargoyle face inventory and equipment menu with health meters and a toggle to show stats. a text log that let’s you read text of what you’re investigating or interacting with.

So I have a quick mock-up I threw together in Godot:
2022-08-31_23-20.png

I’m not quite there yet, I’m still figuring out what screen resolution I like, aspect ratios, UI layout, etc etc.
But I have:

Action buttons on the left Look/examine Interact Talk/Speak Attack Save/Load (the quill works great if I have the caption next to it, I think a floppy disk looks better if there is not, maybe will reuse quill for a map/quest log) 3d viewport with first person view some type of tabbed GUI on the right for eventual inventory, stats tracking, health/mp/whatever bottom area I plan to also add a text log so I can have shitty programmer art that looks like garbage but can still determine what it is.

For now I actually don’t have mouselook at all, I decided to try to go “old school” and ripped out mouselook in favor of letting the user click around on things, and they can use WASD to move forward and back, strafe/side step left and right, and then Q to rotate left and E to rotate right. I think that works out slightly better to let the user click on/interact with specific things in a scene, and hopefully will give it more of an older school vibe.

One thing I don’t know if I"ll implement is that Ultima Underworld does implement turning if your mouse is near the edges of the 3d viewport, that might also be worthwhile to implement so I may do that too, we’ll see.

I think next order of business is figure out world loading, kind of the menu flow from main menu, gameplay, and basic player save/load, then I"ll work out the stats/combat, and inventory/equipment pieces.

I think in the end I want to implement basic dialogue, inventory, and maybe a quest system, along with a stat based arpg system setup.

For style I know I want it to have crunchy pixels and I picked out a few different palettes from Lospec, so I’m hoping that if I limit myself to the same few palettes it’ll look somewhat okay, but if not then I guess it’ll probably be fine. So far I have one palette picked out for UI stuff, and one that I"m using to draw up some equipment in libresprite.
Here is some of that equipment textures/sprites work I did:
2022-08-31_23-36.png

I think it would be cool to model some of it in 3d and then just map pixel art onto it as textures, but I might also just go with 2d sprites for some of it. I think monsters/creatures makes sense to be 2d sprites but it might depend on what it is.

Today’s update!

In the last two weeks I’ve:

Fixed some bugs in Breaditor Been working on a event-driven C++ UI system Been learning unique_ptr<> for the first time to deal with fixing ownership/lifetime issues for said UI system! Lost 5 lbs (idk does that count?)

Devlog 2022-07-06 made enemy “AI” a little better add a display of the enemy name during targeting tweak a few places to change how a selection is highlighted to make it more obvious some boring (to talk about) refactoring and trying things out that haven’t gotten anywhere yet started on building out the village of the fae

I missed last week for personal reasons, which also led to me not getting as much done since then as I’d normally like.

Enemies

Previously, enemies had only a half-implemented partial idea for deciding what action to use, exactly. Unless they had a special script for their combat (which I use exactly once), they would always use exactly one attack; the last one they had defined. Now, though, each monster has a table of attacks they can choose from, with a weight. Here are the actions for the Gremlin monster:

"actions": [ { "chance": 2, "skill": "m_slam", "skill_level": 1, "target": "random" }, { "chance": 1, "skill": "stone_spike", "skill_level": 1, "target": "random" } ],

I do a weighted selection from the table based on the “chance” field, and then look at target. At this point, I believe every monster has all its attacks target “random”, which just means a random target. I could have it target a particular character by name and, more usefully, I intend to give myself the ability to restrict targets based on things like “has Energy left”, “the most HP”, etc. Anyway, once a skill and target is chosen, I just apply the skill (at the given skill level; any skill can scale based skill level) to the chosen target.

Weighted Selections

Actually, I want to talk a bit more about this since it’s something I’ve implemented a bunch of times. I often find myself wanting to have a table of options with different likelihoods for each thing. What I do not want to do, though, is define a bunch of percentages that all add up exactly to 100% that I then have to manually tweak each time I add something to the list. What I definitely do not want to do is wrap my head around a random selection based on iterative “rolls”, even though that would be very easy to code – this would look like “start at A and flip a coin; if it’s heads choose A, but if it’s tails then flip another coin; if it’s heads, choose B, but if it’s tails then flip another coin…”.

So instead I do this weighted choice: I just give each thing in the table a “chance”, which can be an arbitrary integer. Two entries with the same chance have the same chance of being chosen, while an entry with twice the “chance” has… twice the chance of being chosen, compared to the other. It’s very easy to reason about, and the code isn’t that hard to write. It looks like this:

func weighted_rand_from(arr, weight_key="chance"): var chance_sum = 0 # start out by summing the "chance" values for the whole table for a in arr: chance_sum += a[weight_key] # notice that we use the [weight_key] parameter so it can be called whatever you need var n = randi_range(chance_sum) # generate a single random number for a in arr: # step through the array, n -= a[weight_key] # subtracting the chance of each entry from the "roll" if n < 0: # once we drop below 0, we've found the one we want! return a return arr[arr.size() - 1] # return the last thing in the array as a safe default

Yes, this does involved iterating over the whole array (potentially) twice, but unless you’re using very large arrays this shouldn’t be an issue. If it ever did, you’d be farther ahead to recalculate your table into something else for your export. I doubt I’ll end up needing to worry about this for Black Mountain.

Enemy Name Display and Highlighting

I mentioned the name of one of my monsters was named a Rumble Bee internally but had to just refer to it as “the wasp monster”, and I got a bit of feedback from a playtester that it’s nice to know what the monsters are called. I tend to agree, so I added a display for them when picking a target.

enemynamedisplay.png

Twig Sprites are one of the first enemies you encounter and probably the easiest to defeat in the game.

Along with that you can see I’ve added an extra cursor to the list of monsters. I’ve added one to the list of party members as well.

partynameselect.png

Kiel is probably going to use First Aid on Omen or something, but who knows for sure.

I’ve also added a small tweak to the character selection in the menu, for viewing status, using items, etc etc. I bump their portrait up a bit just to make it a little more obvious who you have selected. This one was suggested by Hyptosis, and it’s small but I do think it helps with clarity.

statusselect.png

The only way Violet will ever be taller than the other two.

Village of the Fae

The next area I’m working on filling out is the Village of the Fae.

20220706.png

The fairies are definitely friendly and definitely won’t feed your baby to a goat.

This is a very quick paint job (and not even finished) like the rest of my map painting. I just want it to be clear and playable for the time being – it will get much prettier in the future.

@bengrue I do get on discord every once in a while to see what everyone’s up to.

This is coming early since we’re leaving for a family vacation this afternoon. Which also means I’m not going to have time to finish up the last few things in my current sprint before I wanted it to end, but it’s fine. IT’S FINE.

Getting through sprint 0.1 means the underlying systems of the game are 75% to 80% complete. My current sprints match up with the same content and tasks I did the first go-round with Dawnshadow, so I have a pretty good idea with where I’m going. If my estimates hold true and I keep pace with last time, Epic of Serinor: Harbinger will be wrapped up and ready to release February 2022.

Vector art takes me longer than 8-bit pixel sprites, though. Especially since combat’s animated now.

Screenshot of Sai finding a fleeting shadow

New Progress

Implement resting routine Add damaged animation Add incapacitated animation Pass animation processing from battle handler to individual combatants Add incapacitated handling to battle for Sai and ally Add all Shadowed Citadel map events Add ally death processing to combat Draw ability icons for raptor arts Implement Shackle/Shatter switch and functionality Draw cultist combat sprite Add Change Rows functionality Draw saurian menu sprite Draw ability icons for saurian arts Draw saurian map sprite Draw saurian combat sprite Draw tiny bat combat sprite Implement permanent animation for flying entities Draw megabat combat sprite Implement ability effects Draw hopper combat sprite Save wyrmsblood chest contents at game start Access saved contents from individual wyrmsblood chests Script wyrmsblood events for Shadowed Citadel

Issues Resolved

Heal effects can overheal past exhaustion Enemies that kill Sai give their full XP award during the next fight Weapons missing from damaged and incapacitated animations Ally not removed from party after death Raptor missing damaged animation Success rate on Shackle seems suspiciously high CTD if Sai shatters ally, but only from front row

Hi, here’s another weekly update.

I started blocking out some other rooms. I made this forest / plant zone underneath the “castle” zone:

some new rooms

Still super rough, and it will probably need to change as enemies and interactive objects are placed, and game progression is figured out. Anyway, having fun trying stuff out.

Trying to keep to decorating things with a limited amount of tiles, conveying the general texture / theme of stuff with a couple small repeating patterns. The forest uses about 3 main tiles:

foreground “grass”/“bush”/“leaf” tiles background tangled knot of roots/branches background vines/branches

Then there’s a couple blocks or bricks over that, but they’re less common in the central rooms of this area.

In designing the rooms, I tried to make sure every area has multiple exits and distinct areas that can be reached. I’ve been trying to make branching paths that have you weave through multiple rooms, so you need to figure out how things connect. It’s pretty basic so far though. There’s no key items or collectable abilities yet, so it’s pretty easy to “solve the maze” heh.

I still don’t know how I’ll fill in the rooms yet, but it’s a start.

Also started mocking up this HUD, just tossing something very basic in:
idevenk_1.png

Since it’s a “fixed-screen” platformer, I thought a static full-width HUD probably makes the most sense. I was originally thinking of a HUD that repositions itself depending on your spot, but realized those are a bit annoying. And hiding the HUD isn’t really an option unless player health is communicated some other way, or you have a life bar over your player (ugly). And a fixed, floating HUD like Mega Man is more fitting for a game with a scrolling camera and fairly tall corridors, it doesn’t really work here. So static HUD it is!

To compensate for the 8px of space used by the HUD, I scrolled the camera up a half-tile (4px) which seems to work ok. And it saves the need to edit all existing rooms to be 15 tiles tall instead of 16. I prototyped scrolling the camera slightly as you navigated but found it a bit annoying in practice to see it pan every time you go. So a fixed half-tile offset seems to be an ok compromise.

Still seems like I’m in recovery mode, but every couple of nights, I poke at this prototype for an hour or so. Wish I could eventually figure out where this is headed, but it’s still nice to make minor progress somewhere.

I also got my second shot on the weekend. Aside from a bit of a bruised/heavy feeling in my arm, and being a bit drowsy afterwards initially, there weren’t really a lot of other side-effects. After the 2 week recovery mark passes, this may mean more changes, as it will be possible to do a little more outside of the house. I’m still pretty hesitant about being too ambitious with that though, since lots of people still aren’t vaccinated yet, and the new delta variant, etc. Also it may mean working outside of my house a couple days a week, and I have mixed feelings about this. We’ll see.

Anyway, catch you next time!

Sorry about the downtime; there was a server reboot and I hadn’t set up the site to come up without manual intervention yet. Whoops.

Loretian! You should join the discord, would be the easiest way to chat, and share files, hah! Invite link is https://discord.gg/5EVb3w7

@xor_mgambrell_0 This is cool! I’m excited to see the launcher UI. Also I never knew there was an arcade version of the wondrous lad.

Just a small update that’s 2 weeks late.

My fiancee’s younger sister (there’s a biiiig age gap between them) is only 14 and an AMAZING artist. In school she’s in a program where she’s been doing some pixel art and has fallen in love with it. She’s ridiculously good at it too.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any of her pixel art, but I do have a few of her pieces screenshotted.

alt text

I remember having a conversation with her last year about her playing with Godot a bit in school, and she was given all these links so that she could do stuff at home. But, they didn’t have a computer at home. Out of the entire family, I think she relates to me most because she loves games, loves the idea of game development, is, again, a fantastic artist especially for her age, but just never had the resources at home to pursue it outside of school hours.

Well, I upgraded my computer last year, so I had some spare parts. For her birthday this year, I bought a couple of other parts and ended up building her, her very own computer. Her Mom then bought her a monitor, and now she has a nice little PC setup she can mess around with.

Last night she showed me some of the stuff she was working on and it was really cool. She’s played some of my old Verge games and other projects, and was picking my brain about a game idea she had. She already has the main character designed, showed me the pixel version she created, and it looks really good. I was really blown away. Not only that, she was telling me about the style of game, ideas she had for mechanics, and we kind of brainstormed together about what it would like/how it would play, etc. It was a lot of fun…and I remember thinking at her age was probably when I first started becoming interested in game dev, so it was just all around a cool thing.

She asked if I would help her make this game, if she did all the art, would I be willing to help her with programming and making it come to life.

I definitely did my best to set expectations for her…game dev is hard, it takes a long time, we might not finish it (as is our way), she may lose interest, etc. etc., but that I’ve been looking for a project, and would be happy to spend some time putting stuff together for her and helping her bring a vision to life.

So, hopefully for the next post I’ll have some screens to show you, because I think you’ll all be pretty impressed with her work.

Now, I’m excited too.

The past week or so has been… tough due to some personal news that I don’t want to get into here. Nevertheless, taking some time to focus and do some gamedev work was good for me. I didn’t accomplish a whole lot, but I was able to get a few more things done. In no particular order:

Fixed an issue with cross fading between maps. For some reason the volume was not getting capped, so the volume of a song would just keep rising well past the allowed volume. The song wouldn’t get any louder, but it did cause issues when fading out from an extra high volume and end up with two songs playing until the first one finally reached an allowed volume range. I believe this also fixed some random, untraceable crashes as it has not crashed on me once since doing this.

I ported over the multiple input code from Winter, allowing use of both keyboard and gamepad at the same time. It’s definitely still not the most efficient way of doing it, as it assigns a separate control object for both gamepad and keyboard, but it’s done, it works, and I don’t really care. 🤓

I added little captions for when you enter certain areas, such as Anastasia’s House, or the town (which I have named “Haven” for now, but not sure if I will stick with it yet). I am dabbling with the idea of an additional town on another island to justify having an inn on each, and where they would have trade relations. We will see if I go ahead with this idea or not.

There was already an existing effect for scrolling an image across the screen used for clouds in the background and cloud shadows over top of the map. However this effect would draw shadows in the sky which bugged me. Fortunately I already had a script which could render the map to a canvas and save it to an image. I was able to modify that script to create a stencil canvas of anywhere that did not have any pixels colored on the map, and use it with a subtract blend to cut out cloud shadows where they should not be drawn. I think the final effect ended up pretty nice:

Fu10_Shadows.gif

Next on my todo list are more scenario updates - changing the way the first cave works, in particular, as it’s quite annoying to pass through, and the conversation with Freidrich at the end is extremely lengthy and should be broken up. As well, I want to complete the previously incomplete and thus disabled Inventory screen. It “works” currently, but acts only as a list of items that you have collected (which is not much yet). I want to divide this up into various categories of items and make finding/purchasing equipment a bit more of a part of the game. There are some unused assets, as well as some I may borrow from Hyptosis and Corey. It should be interesting developing this part some more.

877dae88-6e15-4a29-a1eb-8022d2be183c-image.png

Of course, the game right now is hardly long enough to justify such changes, so as hinted above already I think I am going to lean into expanding the game to actually make it worth playing, and doing all these updates. It seems to be getting a lot of positive reception wherever I’ve shown it, so I think it could do “well” as a followup to Winter. Of course this would mean delaying working on Mannux a bit more, but given there are Godot 4 features I want to take advantage of before really starting to work on it in earnest, I think it will be worth the wait.

In terms of a bit more details, I definitely want to expand the first “green” island, as there is already a section you can only get to with the grapple item you find in the first dungeon. There is also a completely unused desert tileset that I want to take advantage of for a second island. And of course it wouldn’t be difficult to add in another color swapped dungeon or two, though designing them will be interesting. Fortunately the tileset used in Fukyuuten is a good deal easier to use than Winter’s, so I believe expanding the content won’t take too long, relatively speaking.

For a desert dungeon, a potential boss enemy is already being designed by my friend Adam (insomniacsoleil on Discord).

03609660-a58d-4b08-9d20-6808c36a4760-image.png

He would have several different attacks, but I’ll leave those as a surprise. 😉

Hello my wonderful friends! My delinquency here is not to say I haven’t been working on indie game stuff frequently. Like Hatchet posted, I’ve been clocking a lot of time on the Mannux project.

I have a lot of irons in the oven right now, but I did manage to get inspired and rebuild my personal site. It’s deployed here: https://jeffgamedev.com/
There’s a “Play” page where you can play a bunch of the stuff I’ve posted here, as well as some others.

I’m planning on completing Grand Onion this year. I have some ideas about how to monetize it, but I plan on making it completely free and without DRM.

Woohoo! Gruedorf!

@bengrue said in Test test test:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

I think it comes down to what are the most irritating things to have to work around. Because anything I wanted to do, I could. It’s just ugly sometimes.

I think the biggest one for me would be having access to real floats. I ran into integer rollover issues trying to get good precision in Dawnshadow’s damage calculation and had to break it up. And regeneration effects regenerate health unevenly. Again, I could have designed it better (and may yet) but it was one of the more aggravating bits to get working properly with only ints.

Member functions or the ability to pass structs as arguments would have been occasionally useful, but they’re not critical since everything is public. I made good use of two of the more recent additions to vc, specifically dicts and varargs. Those were very useful.

And make sure to warn people if order of operations ever gets fixed. I know that I coded some things with the assumption Verge would read it left to right.

Worked for EA several years, got some health issues because of the stress and everything. I have mostly recovered, currently at a temporary job, and working on a new project, more ambitious than previous ones, but using some nice tools to organize my work (https://www.worldanvil.com). It’s titled “Record of the Dragon Goddess”

It’s about a world created by a Dragon God, and how things don’t go as he expected. The story follows the actions of his two offsprings, Amaxis and Draxenath, as perceived from the mortals’ perspective. I have been working on an “Interview with the Dragon Goddess” as a form of introductory series of texts.
Record of the Dragon Goddess blog

I hope to join you on Discord soon.

It’s this one.

MLK day!

Week 9: Not Much

This week I took time off from my personal projects and basically worked a lot and focused on Path of Exile.

As a part of that, I did build a small simulator that modeled the damage output of the Path of Exile bleed mechanic, but it’s not something I plan to share with the world. Here’s a screenshot:

858077a5-1de7-4222-9fa4-a4f66d5344b8-image.png

Next Week

More of the same, I predict. I’m taking a brief break from game dev. But I wanted to continue posting here so it is easier for me to transition back into active dev work.

The Verge3 docs you uploaded are perfect, thanks so much!

June devlog time!

During the month of June, I submitted The Mangotronics Employment Collection to Steam for review. I was finally able to get whitelisted for a Steamworks publisher account after a bunch of annoying back-and-forth, setting up a business bank account and all that fun stuff. Here’s the bulleted list of my accomplishments this month.

What I Did:

Got a Steam publisher account Added 3 new games to the collection (signed 2 more contracts) Did a lot of planning and re-prioritization of tasks Updated the web site & published 3 minor updates to Itch.io Integrated the Steamworks API into the existing project Added achievements and Steamcloud support Submitted to Steam for review

What I Need to Do:

Monitor the results of Valve’s review process Make any necessary changes and resubmit Add another game and throw feature creep out the window Marketing marketing marketing… Testing testing testing… Press the Publish button

The planned release is for July 22nd, and I’m stoked!

I’ll follow up to this post with details on the above accomplishments hopefully before then.