Weekly update

With article being finished, with crunch at work and after I bought Just Cause 2 (finally, as I was pretty reluctant about it, as I know that every game I buy or try will steal few hours of my life :) but I do like playing games, otherwise I would not be in gamedev) I did few important things. It is now obvious that I won't finish MS3 this week but it is closer and closer. And yesterday was lost to making dumplings (pierogi). I did 100 of them and could do more if I had more time :)

So here are the changes:

• some work on Library's combined stores (currently used for animations/animation sets and for attacks and possibly some other actions in future)
• reorganised interfaces for playing animation (separated context and requester interfaces)
• added attack types

Plan for this week? Add handling of projectiles to attack and code to handle death. If I do it, then I will start to work on actual enemies (now there is a testbed one but I will have to purge everything from it and write proper tests, so when I change something, I will be able to test it) and I plan to make at least two types (melee and projectile-based) with probably melee enemy working in group.

Weekly update

Ok, so to wrap up last week, I did some further work on library references and still need to do a little before I move on to add attacks (that should be fairly simple though).

And now, as I mentioned in previous post, I'd like to share some thoughts and ideas I had for Dragontorc.

Visual style / renderer

Most likely first implementation will be based on 2D graphics but I was thinking a lot about some voxel based renderer (it may not be proper voxel renderer, as it could be just normal triangle-based mesh created from voxel graphics) and in the end I would like to have it, but for the time being, I will stick to the basic 2D.

The reason for 2D is that I have some bits of it, it will allow me to focus more on gameplay itself. Having 3D with voxels make it easier for some people to work with than normal 3D and there is still that pixelated look. Voxels also help with having less data to be created than for 2D (4, 8 directions?), although each single frame of animation requires more work. But in future, if all data is in 3D then it might be used in more complex 3D game.

Versions of game

I am thinking about having at least three different versions of game.

1. Full game with modding support, documentation, maybe custom editors (although everything should be possible to be done with text editor). This would be most expensive one... Hey! I would still like to earn something ;) And by most expensive I mean most expensive of all versions. The prices still should be quite low. This version should allow people to add new content or even create new games. It will require something to make it easier to distribute people's work to make it as easy as possible for inexperienced players to try various stuff.
2. Remake of Avalon and Dragontorc. It would be great to have them as faifthul to originals as possible, but I don't consider it as necessity. Of course this version would be free.
3. New adventure that would make use of almost all engine features that I plan to have. Ideally this could be few hours long game that could be bought for some really, really small amount of money. Not extensible as full game but should give feeling of what can be achieved. Having this version free, could make no sense if it would be few hours long.

I don't know what will be order of releasing all versions. At the moment I don't even know when I will finish it. But yes, I want to make it a commercial product. Why? Take a look at the time it takes me to do anything. Weeks, months. Because I am working on it just few hours each week and even then I am not fully focused on it. If I had more stable situation financialy-wise then I could quit my current job and work on it full-time. But it may not happen anytime soon. Releasing it as commercial product could change it. Even if the success would be really moderate.

But now, let's finish this milestone!

Weekly update

Back from short holiday. As I had virtually no access to power source, I didn't do anything during my days off. But before I managed to refactor some bits and add few small things (hm, maybe not that small and very important and actually, very useful). Custom animations are still not in the game but are closer and closer.

During this week I haven't done anything and probably I won't as I have to work on the article and we will have some guests and there's lot of other things going. But I was thinking a little about ways of publishing Dragontorc as remake, original game, a mix of both, etc. I will share it on Sunday.

Weekly update

No code done this week. For various personal reasons.

I just had some time to think about how attacks, animations, ai code go together and I hope to do this during this week.

And I also found out that where I am going to the sea side, there will be very limited access to power, so I won't be able to do any coding. But - I will take my notepad. I haven't done such thing for ages now. Designing stuff without any access to computer ;) Of course I was writing down some ideas from time to time, but not actually designing anything.