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Epic of Serinor Dev Log

Sunday, 28 February 2010
Adjective (n): describing word
Topic: Progress Report

Abilities and spells now show their descriptive text during battles.  It needs a bit of formatting yet to make it pretty in all circumstances.  Also, attacks aren't quite described yet, since they don't follow the standard rules for effect invocation.  But it's a start.

Syn also drew a new water monster, which is exciting.  The two underwater dungeons were where I left off last time I stopped working on Serinor, so work presses on, even while I'm bogged down back at the very start of the game.


Posted by Eldritch at 11:21 PM EST

Sunday, 21 February 2010
Arena
Topic: Progress Report

I needed something to cleanse my palate, as it were, since I'm getting very close to burnout on Serinor.  So I started a rudimentary combat system based off of the Ars Magica rules.  It's still very, very early in development, but combatants trade blows until one inevitably dies.  There's room for a lot of sophistication--Ars Magica is nothing if not thorough/complex--but it feels good to be doing something simple.  My very first experience with programming was a basic battle system on a TI-82 calculator, and this reminds me a little of that.

Anyway, hopefully back to Serinor next week.  Or at least a distributable battle system mock-up.


Posted by Eldritch at 11:01 PM EST

Sunday, 14 February 2010
Level Up!
Topic: Progress Report

Not much time for Serinor this week.  I corrected a couple of bugs (hero retrainings, clock displays) and did some redesigning of the order conditions and effects are stored on combatants.  Mostly I got the primary/instant half of leveling up inserted.  The racial stat point isn't assigned, which makes leveling up at this point permanently damaging to a character, but it's a start.


Posted by Eldritch at 6:37 PM EST

Sunday, 7 February 2010
No Joy in Mudville
Topic: Progress Report

The spell menu opens and spells can be cast.  Which makes me happy, because the wizard is dishing out some serious punishment now.  Spells and abilities also consume mana, but they don't yet make any sort of accuracy check.  One step at a time.

In today's spirit of competition (I expect much wailing and gnashing of teeth when I go into work tomorrow; yay for living in Indy now) I'd like to point out a few of my recent Gruedorf milestones:

  • I'm in second place for number of posts and was closing in on the leader, Ustor, until he decided to come back from obscurity.
  • I'm in fifth place for survival time, having passed up the previous hurdle, Kildorf.  Next in line is the other title character, McGrue.  Speaking of...
  • I've passed McGrue in longest streak time, leaving me in third place here.  Second and third place here are seriously dedicated Gruedorfers, though now both inactive.  It'll be six more months without lapse before I catch either Kael or Pthaloearth.

With this post, I'm only six behind Ustor to take the Most Posts title.  Let the games begin.


Posted by Eldritch at 10:55 PM EST

Wednesday, 3 February 2010
Expanded Attacks
Topic: Progress Report

Continued work on getting all of the various options in the battle system working properly.  Updates include:

  • Gladiators have always had their off-hand attacks, but now rogues have their damage bonus when concealed (because they can be concealed now) and adepts generate less hate (though monsters don't actually check that yet.)
  • The ability menu opens, though selecting an ability just wastes your turn at the moment.
  • Group effects are scripted.  It's really just an outer casing for the normal script for applying effects that goes through an entire side of combat automatically.  This means group attacks (like Arcane Burst, seen above) work perfectly now.

It's coming along.  Hopefully with a few more hours of work, all the basics will be done, with just scripting for higher level attacks needing done.


Posted by Eldritch at 8:50 PM EST

Thursday, 28 January 2010
Another Early Update
Topic: Progress Report

So I'm going to be out of town again for the weekend due to another death in the family.  Fortunately, I got my hour in early this week.  It accomplished all of making sure the guest heroes have equipment that is created and updates stats correctly, but it's something.  I also made sure full-scale combat worked as expected, which it does, more or less.  The feeling I get is that it needs some form of automation to speed things up, but I knew that from the start.

Now I need to go be with my family to mourn my grandfather's passing.


Posted by Eldritch at 10:52 AM EST

Saturday, 23 January 2010
Spellbooks Complete!
Topic: Progress Report

It was a lot of work over the last two days, but Serinor's new spell list is complete.  There are 246 spells divided across 6 attributes and 12 schools.  Each school has spells controlled by each of the six attributes, all within reach of a member of the race who can access that school.  This was like a massive brain teaser, but I eventually hammered it out.

So a Human Knight can learn all spells that have a Vitality requirement, but could also (potentially) learn any spell from the Divine school, regardless of the controlling attribute.  Of course, he'd have to meet the attribute requirement for those Divine spells first.  He has the potential to reach any stat requirement for a Divine spell, but even at level 50, he won't have enough stat points to learn all of them.

Now it's just a matter of data entry to get them all into a format Serinor can read.  Yay.


Posted by Eldritch at 4:58 PM EST

Sunday, 17 January 2010

I know I just updated yesterday, and I should probably save this in case I don't get in another hour of work this week, but it was too exciting for me not to post about: it's now possible to save and load the game again.  That's a huge deal in any RPG, obviously, and it feels like a huge weight off my chest to know that it's done and functional.  And modular, in case I need to add things later (which, most likely, I will.)  Not backwards compatible yet, but that's coming later.  I promise.

Next in line is ability/spell definitions.  The names show up in the skill menu, but that's all they are so far: names.  There's no scripting or even data to back them up.  I also have to get some basic definitions of what the demons on the island are like so Syn can design the monsters.

But with the Hero Shrines functional, it means control comes back to the player for the exploration of Achiela Island.  And Syn has some intriguing ideas about dungeon design, so we'll see if we can't get some of them implemented for the ruins themselves.


Posted by Eldritch at 7:30 PM EST

Saturday, 16 January 2010
More Menus
Topic: Progress Report

Blocked out the Skills & Traits menu frame, which means you can see all of the nifty things you've customized your heroes to be able to do.  This particular screen capture displays a bug in the hero copy/paste function which I've since corrected, but didn't want to go back through the tutorial yet again to get a clean picture.  Adain should have the Crusader trait, but it didn't copy correctly when I reordered the party.  Oops.  I also think I'm going to rename Interposition Interposing Blow.

I recently purchased Divinity II: Ego Draconis, so I haven't been devoting as much of my time to Serinor as I have in the past.  However, both Syn and Dratz have been active.  Dratz finished off the facial artwork for halflings and my lone lukosian, some of which can be seen above.  And Syn's been busily plotting new and interesting monsters to eat the party. 

Also, this past week I broke my personal Gruedorf record for longest streak without lapsing, so now the clock's counting: how long can I go?


Posted by Eldritch at 5:09 PM EST

Saturday, 9 January 2010
Spells
Topic: Progress Report

Started porting the spellbook this week into its new incarnation.  Spell levels as they used to exist are gone, replaced entirely by attribute requirements.  Level requirements are gone; the sooner your hero hits the attribute requirement for a spell, the sooner he can begin casting it.

Also disappearing are masses of duplicated spell effects.  Spells are primarily sorted by attribute now instead of school, so having three different psyche-based spells that have identical effects is more than a little redundant.  Spell schools still exist, but they only matter for heroes of specific races that don't otherwise have access to a spell from their class.  Humans, for instance, have the option of learning all Divine spells.  The Divine spellbook has shrunk significantly from before, but your rogue could have access to a wide array of healing spells, most of which are Psyche-based.

Right now I'm mostly defining which effects are controlled by which attribute.  Then I can pick apart Serinor's spellbook to fill slots from different schools.  So there's one line of powerful healing spells in the Psyche spellbook, but they come from various spell schools, so depending on the race, different classes could access pieces of the spell line but not the whole thing.  I just have to get the books and schools balanced against each other.


Posted by Eldritch at 5:05 PM EST

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