Fishguts
Friday, August 20, 2010
Maps
Short but sweet, these two Greyhawk maps have inspired me to revisit my own game overworld map.
http://paizo.com/download/dungeon/desktops/Greyhawk_1600x1024.jpg
http://www.thekeep.org/~wombat/Greyhawk/abyss_cy589_darlene_map_redo.jpg
Filed Under : Computers • Development • Fishguts •
Tags: Mapping
(0) Comments
Friday, July 16, 2010
Sound
I really need to start working on the sound effects for my game. I think this is going to be a whole new kettle of fish as far as issues go for using the same effects on pc/psp/gp2x etc but it should not be too bad. The first plan is to hopefully just use the SDL mixer and my own WAV mixing routines..
I have a nice USB microphone but it really picks up ANY noise in the house so.. going to take me a while to get some nice sounds recorded for spell affects and such.
Filed Under : Computers • Development • Fishguts •
Tags:
(0) Comments
Monday, May 31, 2010
Smoothing rough edges
I’ve finally got around to smoothing some of the rough edges in the combat engine. We have a somewhat animated spell affects flying across the screen, and special cases which I am going through one by one.
* HOLD (done)
* SLEEP (testing)
* POISON (testing)
* CHARM (testing)
Still have another 4 or 5 flags to code and test (things like turning undead, etc).
Filed Under : Computers • Development • Fishguts •
Tags: Spells
(0) Comments
Refactoring
I’m in the middle of refactoring some of the combat code to allow me to target any space on the map not just NPC’s. This will allow you to drop gas clouds on terrain and use space between to funnel enemies down etc and play more advatange with the terrain.
Most of my code tho takes an NPC as a target, so I’ve got to tweak things a bit.
Filed Under : Computers • Development • Fishguts •
Tags: Combat
(0) Comments
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Playing and bugging
Nothing huge to report lately. A snafu in upgrading my Ubuntu broke SlickEdit, which luckily they upgraded to a new major version which fixed the Ubuntu regression. New Ubuntu and new SlickEdit is nice 
So, been playing my game, eating my dogfood and doing lots of combat… and I noticed something funny. When you would get close to an archer or the archer would run out of arrows, the AI has them switch to a melee weapon.. and they started doing twice damage. So when they unequipped the bow, instead of removing the bows damage stats they added.. then they equipped a sword and that added the swords damage stats.. gulp! Turns out I had two routines for unequipping items and the monster AI was using an old one that was not used anywhere else, which was bugged, so now everyone uses the same (players, monsters, npc’s).
Several other minor tweaks and things behind the scenes. Some map editing and implementing story and details, slowly growing my game.
Tweaking my random dungeon routine, I already have Cellular Automata for organic cave generation, now I’m appropriating my dungeon generation routine from another one of my roguelikes, this one generates rooms and corridors, it has some nice properties that I like that you don’t see in a lot of roguelike dungeon gen routines, namely corridors can loop back on themselves and link up and connect rooms. Most routines in the RL community create a branching dungeon that is somewhat linear in its layout, they don’t link back on themselves, which I think is a pain for gameplay, but it does drive you forward.
I’m still trying to come up with a good name too :( Maybe in the end I’ll stick with Fishguts, which was not my intention.
Filed Under : Computers • Development • Fishguts •
Tags: Bugs • Combat
(0) Comments
Saturday, March 27, 2010
A retro crpg
Sometimes there are many distractions in life, and I feel I am my own worst enemy. I have not even finished my current retro-styled CRPG, but ofcourse I have kicked some notes and code around for a C64/C128 CRPG.
Random thoughts to follow;
Going to utilise a 1 bit fastloader, something like u3load (because the routine is public and it is also supported by ultimate1541-ii), this lets me get a ‘fastload’ as well as music/gfx during load to retain felxability.
I’ve already written simple scripts that will be turned into native 6502/6510,6809 code. Targeting C64, (maybe apple2) and Coco3.
The coco3 makes it nice that it has a good stack of ram, the C128 obviously gives you a nice amount to play with, but the C64 can be constraining, memory mapped IO ports all over the map. I’m hoping I can decouple the kernel so I get the full 64kb ram, but if there is a cartridge or REU, I’ll loose 8kb.
The plan would be to have a simple API in place, a few kb ram with a jump table giving basic routines, whose sole job is to load/unload the scripts. If I can’t nuke the kernel rom space, I can nuke the basic rom and give myself about 50kb.
I’ve already got an experimental script compiler outputting 6510 asm. I need to get it to interface with CC65..
sigh.. I dont think I’ll multiplex sprites but I need to try and get the fastest tile rendering routine I can out of the C64’s MCM mode…
Filed Under : Computers • Development • Fishguts •
Tags: 6510 • 6809 • Apple2e • C128 • C64 • Coco3 • CRPG • fast loader • Tandy
(3) Comments