Fishguts
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Split Personalities
Tonight I re-ordered a little code and I now have the ability to split the party up into 6 teams. I did draw a line, you can only have 6 players in the party, so if you split them all up into 6 individual teams, those teams of 1 can’t go off and hire 5 more players… You can only hire players until all 6 slots are filled (otherwise you could more or less have infinite parties of any hireable NPC).
Its one thing I loved about Wasteland and Magic Candle I was the ability to split up your party, so I _HAD_ to have it in mine. Obviously it will bring with it the obligatory split up and push levers puzzle of course!
Filed Under : Computers • Development • Fishguts •
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Thursday, September 10, 2009
Fixing the Data Driven
Sometimes thinking about it is enough, I’ve actually knocked out a data driven model based on one I had done before for one of my defunct roguelikes, that is a lot more compact in code and works much much better. All I had to do was step back, scrap the current stuff and voila, it all fell into place.
The data remains the same, its just a different implementation and that makes all the difference.
Filed Under : Computers • Development • Fishguts •
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Data Driven
Lately I have been implementing my spell system into the game and I have realised something I didn’t really want to. Ideally I had wanted my spell system to be data driven, in that I could describe the spells I needed with some attributes and voila, generic system works on the data and you have spells. Which is fine for most spells that deal or reverse damage or alter a stat. Those are the simple ones.The issue I wanted to avoid is one where you have code that basically says “if spell name == ‘foo’ then do this” and suddenly you have tied your spells directly to code…
So spells that affect stats and damage are really easy but how do you deal with abstract spells like ‘See Invisible’ or ‘Sharpen Steel’ to fix weapons. Right now I have columns in my spreadsheet for everything, sometimes existing for only 1 spell, which feels like a waste. It does make it all data driven, it just does not feel so good in its implementation.
Already I’m kicking around an alternate implementation thats a lot more concise and much easier to implement but still giving me the exact same ingame output.
Filed Under : Computers • Development • Fishguts •
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Thursday, August 06, 2009
Thinking about the spanner
So, thinking more about the spanner I posted about last night, I’m trying to decide how to handle the beast that is invisibility. The easy answer (there is always an easy answer) is to make invisibility a combat only spell. Doing that also kinda takes away from some of the cool things you could do outside of combat with it. You could use it to reduce wilderness combat by say 50% for visual tracking monsters.
But how does it work when you walk up to an NPC to talk to them, or walk into a shop to buy/sell/trade??
Invisibility is a very slippery slope to deal with.
Filed Under : Computers • Development • Fishguts •
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Wednesday, August 05, 2009
Throwing a spanner in the works
So I was working on the last of the status, unconscious… and a spanner appears in the works. When a character is unconscious, they are prone on the ground. That means every monster requires a prone icon. ugh. I’m not sure I want to go down that road. Now with monsters it is easy, they are alive, dead or stoned. For the player, unconscious, is another chance at life, at staying in the game. Its a pain on my end tho, at what point dos unconsciousness begin? If you have 0 hitpoints are you alive or dead? is it between 0 and -10?
Right now I’m going with -10 .. 0 is unconscious. Below -10 is dead. There is only actually places in the game that actually check hitpoints, everything else runs on status.
I’m rethinking the whole unconscious thing. Right now its in, but um… rolling it around in my head…
Filed Under : Computers • Development • Fishguts •
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More status changes
Doing more testing and tweaking last night, I noticed another oddity. Sometimes one of the NPC’s would target a stoned player, and the stoned player would miss or defend. Hmm..
Minor tweaks, now stoned or unconscious states will automatically set the defensive value to 0.
The other bug to track down is why some NPC’s would target a stoned player over a living one when they should have already been filtered out…
I love one line fixes. OK I had to make 3 one line fixes.
Now to have spells thrown across the map, all code should be set up, its just matter of selecting spell and having it animate across the map the same way arrows animate across the map…
Well its never that simple but it should be close.
Filed Under : Computers • Development • Fishguts •
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