Blog Tools
Edit your Blog
Build a Blog
RSS Feed
View Profile
« February 2009 »
S M T W T F S
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
You are not logged in. Log in
Entries by Topic
All topics  «
Progress Report
Small Talk
Serinor Manual
Introduction
Controls/Menus
Statistics
Races
Classes
Abilities
Downloads
Team and Thanks

Eldritch Thoughts
Recent News
Iridescent Dreams
Story Archive
Eldritch's Hoard
Valian's Den

Gruedorf Challengers
Zodiac Cogency
Armor Factory
Scroll-a-tron 9k
Geas
Saga of the Stars
Signal
Amethyst
Contrivia
Soul of the Machine
Vulture
Stick Ninja
Tactical Action RPG
Chinese Phonetics and Phonemic Fury

Epic of Serinor Dev Log

Thursday, 19 February 2009
Obsidian Portal
Topic: Progress Report

Game dev time this week was spent on Epic of Serinor 4e.  The party is moving from heroic to paragon tier, so there was a lot of individual, out-of-game effort to get all of them onto a paragon path with rational storytelling, rather than just saying, "Hey, you're an Iron Vanguard now.  Congratulations!"

Also started trying out Obsidian Portal, which is a wiki service for RPG's.  You can find the start of a Serinor campaign wiki, which still needs lots of work, but is a productive undertaking.  In that it makes me write down all this stuff for real, rather than just have it all bouncing around in my head.


Posted by Eldritch at 12:05 AM EST

Wednesday, 11 February 2009
Small Adjustments
Topic: Progress Report

Serinor is a big project, and it taught me quite a bit about putting a game together.  Today specifically, I'm talking about abilities.  Serinor stores all of its abilities (and it's got a lot: 360 spells plus any class abilities.  I think I'm past 500 by this point) in a long list.  It tracks name, description, cost, and an effect number.  Any individual effect is a reference to another long list, where each unique possible effect of an ability is scripted.

I added just one number to this when making Gelardia (okay, and another string, but it's less significant.)  In addition to the effect reference, the ability database tracks the strength of the ability.  It's ingenious, and I wish I'd done it for Serinor.  Instead of having to seperately script a healing ability for every possible amount of healing, a healing ability knows innately how much it's going to heal.  So I just script a heal effect once and every healing ability can point to that, passing in its own strength.

It's kind of fun, because descriptive text can be generated dynamically rather than being stored in a .dat file.  So if your magic stat goes up, the description of all your abilities takes the change into effect and automatically updates the description of your abilities to reflect your increased power.  That part's coded and working, complete with text highlighting of the important words/numbers in the description.

All of the initial character's abilities are defined, which is also a trick, since the cost and power of his abiliteis varies based on current magic point totals and not just his magic statistic.  So his abilities grow weaker as he uses them, but he gains magic points for each monster he kills.  (He's a manifestation of the god of war; he loses his magic after resting and only regains it through battle.)  I think the abilities scale properly across the levels.  I've also defined a few of the second charater's starting abilities, though his are more static.

Now that I've finalized how I want the information stored in Gelardia's memory and have a few abilities to play with, I can start scripting the actual ability effects.  That should finish up the basics on the battle system, because it'll mean items work also.  They use the same framework.


Posted by Eldritch at 11:53 PM EST

Thursday, 5 February 2009
An Unpleasant Week
Topic: Progress Report

So last week my computer was dead.  Over the weekend, I spent my time getting that straightened out, including getting all my games reinstalled.  Gelardia and Serinor both survived the transition to a newly-cleaned computer.  That's about all I have for Gruedorf this week: I saved my projects from oblivion (which, incidentally, I did not reinstall.)

Then this week, I nearly died during the snow storms when a woman in the lane next to me decided to fishtail and swerve in front of me on the interstate.  The front of my new Prius is more or less smashed completely in.  If I'd been somewhat more with it at the time, I'd have snapped a picture before the wrecker towed it away.  At any rate, I've stopped shaking and have returned to work.  Hopefully productivity will pick back up next week.


Posted by Eldritch at 10:26 AM EST

Thursday, 29 January 2009
An End to Fighting
Topic: Progress Report

As much as I might like to include a screenshot with this post, my computer is currently just an ugly box under my desk back home, seeing as how the built-in system restore failed to, you know, reinstall Windows after it wiped my hard disk.  I'm currently waiting on OS replacement CD's since Dell didn't actually include them with the computer when I bought it.  Fortunately, everything of importance on the computer is waiting patiently on CD's.  So no actually loss.  I hope.  I always forget something when I do this.

Anyway, Gelardia.  Battles end now, and new ones can start right after.  Everything appears to get freed and reinitialized correctly, which is kind of a big deal.  Experience is awarded correctly, and loot displays itself and is added automatically to the party's inventory.  Nothing (or very few things) drop gold; it's all in various loot-class items, which can be traded in for gold or equipment.  The inventory/menu system also functions, but that's not new.  The entire menu system is mostly just a reskinning of a system I made for a different game.  That, come to think of it, I never shared with anybody.  Oh well.


Posted by Eldritch at 4:03 PM EST

Thursday, 22 January 2009
Battle Progress
Topic: Progress Report

Progress continues.  The attack option works, and the Logore up there can attack you back until it inevitably dies.  Attack animations are in, as well as scrolling combat text.  The ability menu scrolls in and out, though none of the actual abilities in it are scripted.  It's also the basis for the item menu, so the basic blit routines for the item menu are designed as well.  As seen above, ability icons darken when the ability is unavailable, and the effect text takes into account the strength of the spell and the user's stats to display the actual expected effect.  Kanan's abilities requre special scripting since they grow stronger/more expensive as he gains MP.

Next in line is to get combat rewards displaying and awarded correctly, along with all end-of-battle effects.

 


Posted by Eldritch at 11:28 PM EST

Sunday, 18 January 2009
Battle Beginnings
Topic: Progress Report

Started work on combat pieces.  The system can calculate turn order ten turns out based on the speed of all combatants ala Final Fantasy X (if I remember it correctly; it's been a long time.)  Battle status boxes are drawn for all heroes, centered properly based on party size.  Also, the top action menu functions, though none of the actions are actually scripted yet.

Next up: drawing monsters to the screen and scripting basic attacks. 


Posted by Eldritch at 1:23 PM EST

Wednesday, 14 January 2009
New Dungeon
Topic: Progress Report


Spent time designing a dungeon this week.  A small one, since it wasn't in the initial game at all.  This little area was originally just a guarded treasure box on a world map, but I decided to do away with that.  Not quite exciting enough.  Or logical from a story standpoint.

I also spent time mourning Mason's Memoirs's loss in its competition.  But not much.  It suffered a lot from time constraints, and the winning entry was very, very good.


Posted by Eldritch at 2:30 PM EST

Thursday, 8 January 2009
Random Organization
Topic: Progress Report

So after the gargantuan effort of getting Mason's Memoirs together, I've been somewhat at a loss over what I actually want to do.  That and I got Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy IV, The World Ends with You, and Phantasy Star II over the holidays, so I've been somewhat distracted.

I started off working on a new battle system design that, between Final Fantasy and Phantasy Star, I decided I didn't like.  So I went back to another old side project, Gelardia, that also needs its battle system coded.  Of course, first I got nearly all of its files sorted into subfolders, because it was crazy messy.  Then I put together the graphic to the left.  I plan to have it serve as the battle sub-menu, where items and abilities are selected.  Finally, I put some more trees on the world map, which was an experience, because I'd never obstructed the north side of a bank of trees with this tileset before.  Fun times.


Posted by Eldritch at 7:00 AM EST

Wednesday, 31 December 2008
Mason's Memoirs Now Available
Topic: Progress Report
It is done, if not complete.  Download Mason's Memoirs: The Middle Months now.

Posted by Eldritch at 11:35 PM EST

Monday, 29 December 2008
Mason's Memoirs: The Middle Months Update
Topic: Progress Report


Progress continues.

I already hate myself for how little work I accomplished during last week, squandering it on such things as "family" and "togetherness."  I'm going to be unpleasant the next few days as I rush to get every single piece of event scripting into a simulation game.

I always bite off more than I can chew for these compos.


Posted by Eldritch at 7:09 PM EST

Newer | Latest | Older