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Epic of Serinor Dev Log

Saturday, 7 November 2009
Tiny Steps
Topic: Progress Report

It's amazing how little gets accomplished when you only do the minimum of one weekly hour for this competition.

I hacked together a few mock-ups of how I want my UI pieces lined up during combats.  This is my preferred layout, though I also put together some with the heroes aligned along the left or top sides of the screen.  I think this will work out best in the end.

With another hour, maybe I'll have enemies blitted to the screen!  Though in reality, I have to define them first.  And resize all the sprites to a larger resolution.  Without necessarily asking artists whose patience I have already tried far too often to redo every single one of them.


Posted by Eldritch at 3:12 PM EST

Saturday, 31 October 2009
Char Gen Complete!
Topic: Progress Report

Well, I'm pretty much where I expected to be this week.  Stat assignment and attack selection still need their help text written, but the hero is complete: every aspect of initial character generation is done.

Next week I start working on the combat system itself.  I have most of the layout done on paper, and my modular menu system means most of the UI pieces I'll need to draw are already done for me.  I'll also simply be yanking the guts out of Serinor's old combat engine, throwing in the guts of the simple Gelardia engine I did a while back, stirring well, and baking until complete.

The original combat engine for Serinor was such a hacked together thing it could make Frankenstein's monster look gorgeous.  Because of this, there's a deep dread in my stomach when I think about getting back to work on combat, especially from the ground up.  Rationally, I know that I have all the pieces I need to make this thing elegant and easy-to-use, but that doesn't actually soothe the gnawing despair.  It'll be better once the framework's in place, but it seems so far away.


Posted by Eldritch at 1:07 PM EDT

Saturday, 24 October 2009
Equipped for Combat
Topic: Progress Report

Heroes can actually equip the weapons and armor in their inventory, and it correctly updates their combat statistics.  The combat statistic display in the information menu is also complete, allowing the player to actually see how the equipment alters their heroes statistics.

Now that the hero can select and ready his initial equipment, it's time to move onto attack selection and attribute point assignment.  After that, the hero will receive their first spell (which I think I need to rename power or technique.)

Then I'm finally into combat.  I know combat statistics are all programmed correctly, so assuming I get attacks modular enough (at heart, an attack, even a basic one, is just a spell with no mana cost) most of the underlying math should already be done for me.  It'll just be a matter of displaying all the information to the screen and scripting special effects.

[Serinor purists will also note Plant damage has been replaced by Sonic damage, and Earth and Air are gone to make space for Sharp and Blunt, though I can't imagine there's anybody who would have spotted that had I not said something.]


Posted by Eldritch at 1:29 PM EDT

Saturday, 17 October 2009
Taking Stock
Topic: Progress Report

So after I got the displays for attack selection finished, I realized a good portion of the stats in any given attack are related to what you're actually attacking with.  So seeing stats for what something like Twin Strike or Planar Attack does when attacking using nothing but the hero's bare hands is right on up next to useless.  As such, I got the inventory system working.

I already had an item struct built in, so I only had to do two things: take the table of raw equipment data and translate it into a functional piece of equipment and then get it displayed to the screen.  Since I've doubled the amount of screen space, it's now much easier to do a side-by-side comparison of what a hero currently has equipped and what's going to replace it.  And, since an item carries its stats with it now, swapping equipment doesn't require searching through massive dat files for the particular line of stats I want to use.  Just copy to the equipment slot and update the character's stats.

I also reserved space in the item struct for custom enhancements later on.  Another nifty addition available thanks to the disposal of pre-defined dat files!


Posted by Eldritch at 10:38 PM EDT

Sunday, 11 October 2009
A Belated Return
Topic: Progress Report

I would include a screenshot with this, but Serinor has always used text highlighting pretty heavily, and until I get it working in the newest version of VERGE, the menu screenshots I want to show would look something awful.

At any rate, development on the new opening sequence continues.  Rather than generate an entire (faceless) party right off the bat, the player instead designs a single hero piece by piece.  I've scripted through gender, appearance, name, and class while slowly introducing the quest that will take the fledgling hero through the tutorial.  Next in line are stat point assignment and initial attack selection.

After that, it's Combat 101, which means I have to get the new battle system coded.  It's not a complete ground-up rewrite, but it's definitely close enough for jazz, as they say.


Posted by Eldritch at 11:17 PM EDT

Friday, 3 April 2009
Architect

I may have forgotten to update yesterday or the day before.  I haven't worked on Serinor in the past week, which would be why.

I have, however, spent quite some time tinkering with the open beta of the Mission Architect in City of Heroes.  Does writing user-generated content for an MMO count for Gruedorf time?  I don't know.  It was fun, though.


Posted by Eldritch at 4:36 PM EDT

Thursday, 26 March 2009
On Publication
Topic: Progress Report

From what I understand of Wizards of the Coast's Game System License, Serinor violates all sorts of rules and cannot, without significant and canon-destroying alterations, ever be published as a D&D 4e supplement.

That's all I've got this week.  That's a depressing hour or two that I'm not getting back.


Posted by Eldritch at 12:25 AM EDT

Wednesday, 18 March 2009
Character Generation
Topic: Progress Report

Not a whole lot of time this week for Serinor, but I moved forward in the introduction/tutorial to the point where you select one of the six available classes for your developing hero.  So far, this hero has a gender, an appearance, a name, and a class.  Yet to go before a complete level one hero is designed are stat point allocation and initial attack.  One of those two is already coded and just needs scripted/inserted.  The other requires determining how Serinor will hold ability data.

In other news, this is post number 100!  Hooray!


Posted by Eldritch at 8:09 PM EDT

Wednesday, 11 March 2009
Starting the Tutorial
Topic: Progress Report

I reinstalled Morrowind on my computer after it crashed and burned, and did some work installing all of the fancy new mods and extensions that I'd never bothered with before.  The results really are stunning.  But the point I'm working towards is that somewhere amidst all this focus on Morrowind, I read somewhere that Morrowind's simple, almost-hidden tutorial that I completely ignore and sprint through anymore is actually really well-designed and steps the player gently into the massive sandbox that is Vvardenfell.

I'm borrowing pieces of it, as I've done with so much else from Morrowind.  The new Serinor will start with a named, story-centric character that you build, piece-by-piece, through the prologue.  This hero's centrality to the story will begin to fade as the progression of events scales up to the truly epic scale of the middle to late game, but it will hopefully smooth out the horribly difficult early game significantly.

I've also detached appearance from class.  It's still tied to gender, but any male human can select any male human sprite for his appearance regardless of what class he chooses.


Posted by Eldritch at 8:31 PM EDT

Thursday, 5 March 2009
Amin Continent
Topic: Progress Report

This week, I scaled the Amin Continent onto hex paper in preparation of getting the landforms onto a map with actual scale.  It really kind of reinforced for me how small Serinor is.  I mean, it takes up more than a full page of hex paper assuming 10 miles to the hex.  But that means, from the nose to the back of the head, Amin's about as long as the trip we just took from central Indiana to West Virginia (600ish miles).  Kind of depressing.

Really, it's still a lot of land.  There's a weird disconnect between seeing how big it looks on paper to knowing how small it is in reality.  I placed a copy of the rough map below behind a cut, but since the thing's freaking huge, I took it out.  You can see an interactive version on Serinor's wiki.


Posted by Eldritch at 12:21 AM EST

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