Epic of Serinor Devlog

Not gonna lie. Being a cool kid has never been a driving motivation of mine. That said, perhaps I’ll stop by.

West coast going and changing the Gruedorf rules on me after bedtime. I see how it is.

Lost Time: on what I’ve been doing, both the past two years and the past week.

Work of the Week - 13 Feb: Lots of menus and systems work this week. Have to rebuild from the ground up.

Planning the Work: On the importance of having a functional backlog. Also CHR artwork!

Work of the Week - 20 Feb: Art. So much art. But art means the menus work, so I guess it’s okay.

The Actions of Items: Still building menus. Along with a reflection on why the items menus ended up taking longer to implement than I expected.

Work of the Week - Feb 27: I largely abandoned art work this week to get more of the menu systems in place. The bulk of that work is done now, though one of the more difficult menus (quest logs) is yet to come. Especially since I want to implement some changes from how Dawnshadow did it.

Creating Sai: Because now you can create Sai again. Includes additional thoughts on Dawnshadow’s “Nudity” tag and why I’ll probably ditch it moving forward.

Work of the Week - 6 Mar: Another week, another changelog. This week included a lot of unlogged work around getting things to work that worked automatically in Verge, like looping module music, or that I was misled about in GameMaker Studio tutorials, like trusting the room timer rather than checking the actual time delta.

But combat bars work! So the computer’s this close to being able to run battles that nobody can see or interact with.

Action!: More, if slow, combat progress, along with how combat is changing from its original incarnation.

Work of the Week - Mar 13: Combat works! Very, very poorly, but it works. Have to start somewhere.

Learn by Doing: The main game loop is functional. You can explore the Shadowed Vale, fight monsters, take their stuff, and gain experience. Today’s post talks mostly about how and why I’ve changed the original experience system that was in Dawnshadow. And how odd combat feels without its art or animations.

Work of the Week - 20 Mar: It’s not all bugfixes this week, but it’s a lot of bugfixes. Really, I’m just glad I can play it for long enough that bugs pop up. Which is an odd place to be, when I write it out like that.

Quick and short today. I agreed to do cinematography and video editing for the production of Tartuffe that’s being put on by the theater company I’m in charge of. So not a lot of time for personal work this week.

This week I sat down and started work on designing how I actually want Harbinger’s battles to look. Dawnshadow used a very static display of the back of the characters and front of the monsters, all of whom flashed when they attacked or were struck. My goal is to have combats right on the map.

Canonically, the encounters in the Shadowed Vale are random as Syn throws nightmares at Sai from nowhere, so that part isn’t changing. And since I’m not thrilled about animating all the characters in all their various armors with all their different weapons from all four different directions, it’s still going to use a static setup of heroes on the left and enemies on the right. But this will make it at least a bit more dynamic and root it better in the world.

Now I just have to build the thing.

I would get a lot more of my own work done if I stopped taking unpaid creative projects for other people. But then, I’m technically in charge of the theater company, so I guess it’s still my own work. Bottom line, I’m tired of compositing video.

This week, I converted or drew the icons for all of the auto-attacks for the basic weapon types. Mind Stab (the basic attack for the Psion skill) is also included here because I redrew it to match the style of the armed auto-attacks and there was a gap since spears don’t have a magic attack option. I also updated the list of abilities in my design document to make it easier to identify what icons are complete and which need to be drawn depending on which areas of the game world are open.

Yes, it was only an hour, but some weeks, that’s what I have to give.

Yes, it was only an hour, but some weeks, that’s what I have to give.

Some weeks, that’s all anyone can do.

But you did it, so you continue to not-lose!

One advantage to transitioning to vector images is it’s much easier to size and rotate things and still have them look nice. So this week, Sai got weapons that show up while he’s walking around. Which will be important once he has to start fighting with them at this scale.

Also, chibi-style characters have really big heads, and I don’t entirely know what to do with the hilt on that greatsword when viewed from the side.

Oh! And side note. Did you know that, when you upscale and smooth out classic 8-bit, 16x16 character sprites they end up looking like intentionally chibi-style characters?

A few things.

1. This probably needs another frame.
2. I’m going to need to resize my animation frame widths, at least for combat.
3. I also need a separate sequence for magical attacks.
4. Frame animation makes me seriously consider learning sprite animation software, since I have to do these for each of Sai’s body shapes in each style of armor for each weapon. And then again for all the enemies. And then again for Sai’s companions, which are also enemies but facing the other direction and can, again, have different armor and weapons.
5. My scroll wheel broke last week, and I AM DYING.

Tartuffe should be done by the end of next week, so I’ll have that time back. It also means I’m going to start asking for donations soon. Which is, you know, just a fantastic time for everybody.

I think a three-frame animation should work with only slight variations for physical and magic attacks regardless of weapon. So one idle, one shared “I’ma hit it” frame, a physical/magic charge frame, followed by shared “I’m hitting it” and “I hit it” frames. I hope. I need to see it in actual motion. Maybe with particles.

I think after that I just need “I got hit” and “I’m out” frames, and it should be ready for import and testing.

“We have plenty of stories at home,” my wife said. “We don’t need a new one.”

I had never heard such nonsense from somebody I thought I loved.