Epic of Serinor Dev Log

No Joy in Mudville

Sun, 7 Feb 2010 22:55:33 -0500

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.

Expanded Attacks

Wed, 3 Feb 2010 20:50:58 -0500

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.

Another Early Update

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 10:52:49 -0500

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.

Spellbooks Complete!

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 16:58:23 -0500

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.

I know I just updated yesterday, and...

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 19:30:33 -0500

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.

More Menus

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 17:09:43 -0500

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?

Spells

Sat, 9 Jan 2010 17:05:10 -0500

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.

Moderate Progress

Sat, 2 Jan 2010 17:34:08 -0500

The party is full if not complete. Still pending some art changes before the menu will even open after Marty and Aerin join. And though the Hero Shrine will talk you through all the prompts, it won't actually do anything. But everybody joins the party and makes the trek across Amin to the Achiela Ferry, where the battles start up again. Measured and limited battles, mind; I have a set experience quota for this tutorial.

I also spent some time debating how to format save files. Since I'm coming from a fairly extensive base, I know pretty much everything that needs to go into them. They won't be directly compatible with old saves, I already know that. But I do have some features in mind (Dungeon Lords, horribly executed as it was, did teach me some things) that require a bit of extra care in making sure data is saved deliberately.

I also need to finish the abilities menu at some point. All these new party members have all sorts of nifty abilities that the player needs to be able to see and/or use.

Text Timers

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 20:04:59 -0500

Nothing glamorous today.

Over the Christmas holidays, I managed to steal an hour to redo the timing on Serinor's text scrolling, which was borrowed directly from the interactive novel system I'd designed for Syn's old Gruedorf project. Text now scrolls at the same rate regardless of the speed of the computer Serinor's running on. Unlike most throttling work I've done over the years, this should only affect slower computers (like mine), which will see a significant increase in speed. Newer, faster computers shouldn't see a change. I also stopped breaking lines myself and just used WrapText(), which is very nice and for which I'm finding all sorts of applications.

More Holiday Disruptions

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 21:04:16 -0500

Because I'll be unable to update this weekend as normal, and because I have no intention of lapsing in my Gruedorf responsibilities anytime in the near future, even though every other contender is pushing a month of inactivity like the losers they are, I'm moving to Wednesday updates for the next couple of weeks.

The tutorial extends into Erelikoth proper, which I've updated to run in Serinor's new system. Most of this week's hour (or two) was spent on the conversion, but there is a short dialogue explaining why the party was strangely unmolested on the trip between Gelaham and Erelikoth.

Next week, the last members of the party will be introduced, and then it's off to Achiela, where (gasp!) I'll finally be able to save my game and not have to go through the entire stupid tutorial any time I want to test something in sequence. I'll also have to actually design Achiela, since it's one of the maps that was never completed in the original edition. Demonic ruins, anybody? Good times for the whole family!