Epic of Serinor Dev Log

Still on Skills

Mon, 24 May 2010 01:16:20 -0500

Spent part of my hour putting some of the skills I want my monsters to have into a format Verge will read. I spent the rest of an hour on a parser that will put those skills into the monster's struct when loaded. Still needs some work. After that, it's getting a viable AI so that monsters use their skills. Intelligently, preferably, but I'll start with "at all."

A Spell for Sorting

Mon, 17 May 2010 00:45:07 -0500

My spellbooks are readable again. Not overly descriptive, necessarily, but the concise descriptions are in, so I know what everything does again.

The depressing part is that this is in my design documentation, not the actual game. I've got another hour or two putting it into a form Verge can read yet. And then that again getting numbers and effects applied to them.

/sigh

Return of the Spell Lists

Sun, 9 May 2010 22:44:37 -0500

So it turns out I should have done a bit more data entry back when I was complaining about it... however long ago that was. See, when I came back to my spell lists to give my new, classed monsters nifty things to do, well, I didn't know what half the names in the list meant anymore. So. I went back in and spent another couple of hours working on data entry so I know what in the world I was thinking when I named spells. Like True Strike and Vital Strike, right there next to each other. Same controlling attribute, same tier... Which was what? Fortunately I kept a list of the effects each attribute controlled or this would have been much, much worse.

Classy Monsters

Mon, 3 May 2010 00:44:41 -0500

So this is how monster design tended to go in the original Serinor:

I came up with a general theme for the dungeon/region.
I statted out a basic template for an enemy.
I duplicated this monster multiple times making small tweaks in health or skills.
I asked an artist to draw me a picture of my sample monster.
I duplicated picture multiple times making small tweaks in color or details.

This did not make for exciting work, either in design or in play.

Every game I play has an influence, somehow, on the my game designs. Currently, that's Guild Wars, and as I began to work through the above series of steps, it brought me to what seemed, at the time, a novel revelation. If all the heroes have a class, why can't the monsters? In retrospect, it seems trivial and obvious, but it was a big deal when it came up. It was also very late at night, and I may have been somewhat over-tired, but if that's the mindset it takes to come up with things like this then by the gods, so be it.

Serinor's new classes are designed perfectly for this sort of thing. They focus on one statistic but have room for lots and lots of customization. So a given dungeon/region is populated by five or six monsters, which is a fair amount of variety in my experience with similar games (Dragon Warrior.) You'll have your strength monster, which will pound you with physical attacks/skills. The will monster to use elemental attacks. A psyche monster to heal or protect. It not only makes design simpler, it makes combat more interesting and varied across the game. The player knows he's going to encounter a general set of monster roles in any given location, but each role can change drastically in execution from place to place. And it makes the ones that break their role or multiclass stand out that much more.

After I stumbled upon this gem, my demons almost designed themselves. Almost, of course. But I had the general theme, so I just had to pick attacks, skills, and spells from my already established lists to flesh them out. Now they just need to reach an artist.

Hi Ho

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:31:48 -0500

Whereas my my week in Serinor was spent in vague struggles with monster roles/concepts (how varied should fights be in a simple combat system?), Dratz proved to be more productive. I've now got a full set of dwarf faces, seen here. You may wonder about my definition of full, since there are very obvious gaps here. "Full" in this context refers to all of the hero sprites Gayo did before the Great Drought. So I have a picture for each unique dwarf. Now I just need more unique dwarves. Thirteen of them, apparently.

Learning from Experience

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 23:48:17 -0500

Since I didn't actually accomplish any of the things I intended to this week, I went back into the level up scripting since I knew that it was a mess. Tinkered around with the actual mechanism a bit then added scripting for the level up portion of the tutorial. Which did two other things. First, I can add before/after battle special events. Secondly, I discovered a disagreement in variable order between saving and loading files. Fortunately, I managed to find the discrepancy fairly easily. It's always nice when odd run-time bugs are in the first place you go looking for them.

Quality of Life

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 23:51:41 -0500

It's possible to sleep again, which I know is a big deal to the group I had wandering around Achiela Island and fighting my test demons. I also finished the retiming of the menus, so I think everything slides at the proper rate now.

These things I should do next week, because they don't require me to be sitting at a computer to do them:

Design the layout of the ruins of Achiela
Design the demons I want stalking the ruins/island

That list was longer, but it's best to stay small. I never end up having as much time as I want.

Alternative Amusement

Mon, 5 Apr 2010 00:48:55 -0500

So I had an entire week off from work. A nice, relaxing staycation. I intended to spend a day of it working on Serinor. Instead, I spent half a day playing Guild Wars with Carnok and the other leafing through my old notebooks. I took pieces of an old, dead world I worked on in middle school and merged it with pieces of an old, dead game concept to teach myself something about mouse-driven interfaces. You'd think I could work on, oh, I don't know, Mason's Memoirs or Echoes of Llygam, something extant that could use some work. No. I build something from the ground up. This is why I never get actual work done.

The screen above reacts to the mouse. You can reassign stat points, you can change between party members, and everything updates like its supposed to. Until you leave the Party tab. Then you can change between the tabs, but nothing ever comes back on the screen, even if you go back to party. Not particularly functional.

It did teach me a good bit about how to craft a logical, mouse-driven interface in VC, without any sort of objects to speak of. I don't know that I'll use it, but Llygam and Mason could benefit from some of the technical aspects I put together. Not that, you know, either of them have much larger issues unrelated to the programming of their interface. No, not at all.

Another Week On the Road

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 23:18:14 -0500

Dratz continues to carry the team with actual digital work, as I spent the weekend away from my computer, ~~looting~~ emptying my grandfather's house. I have new menu/portrait faces for my handful of male dwarves from him, and I spent my hours in the car plotting out some story elements, primarily on how to transition from tutorial to game. Though there was still some end-game thrown in there. Serinor's always had an open world, and I want to keep that. But you still have to have the entire world on your side to win. The trick is to make that required without arbitrary hurdles. That specific races have unique abilities makes it a much easier process.

Menu Time (GMT-timer)

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 22:29:33 -0500

I retimed the menus so they should scroll at the same speed regardless of processor speed. There are a couple holdouts, but the primary scrolling is done.

I feel silly posting things when I'm really only doing my bare minimum of one hour's worth of work. But then, that's probably why I'm the only active Gruedorfer left. Because everybody else is hard at work, but don't want to post things as lame as "I retimed all the menus so they should scroll at the same speed regardless of processor speed."

Right?