Code Ugly
About Me
- Name: Greg Tedder
I am a Christian, a family man, a college student, a full time worker, a contract developer, and a musician who is currently trying to break in to the indie gaming market. I like games, mainly turn based RPGs, but my interests do wander when a good creative title comes along.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Inventory and Hexes
This last month has slowly brought some new features up for display in the Aeges Project. As stated in one of my previous blogs, I have put the inventory on a grid as you can see the screen shot below. A little bit of work has been put into implementing day and night, as well as keeping track of days. There is also good improvement in foilage and the level is building really nicely right now which brings me to my next item checked off the list.

I am a constant tester and tweaker, so after building two full 'basic' levels and performance maintained, I decided to try doing a single level. With a little partitioning of spaces things seem to be going well. I didn't any dynamic level loaded like I had planed, but rather I load the entire scene, and let each object add itself into its partitioned space. So far it functions almost as well as the individual layers, and still loads almost as fast. Right now on my MacBook I am getting a 4 second load time, while on my old 1.3Ghz I am getting a 10 second level load time.
Finally, the current project is somewhat undoing a change I made. I made the comment that I was going off the grid, and now I half repent of that decision. Exploration feels a lot better with free movement and not being tied to a grid, but tactical combat was suffering from a lot of silliness because of it. So now, when combat starts the players are aligned to the nearest grid and kept on the grid for the duration of the skirmish.

My biggest gripe with the isometric 2:1 grid for combat was range. Range was always fairly clumsy and the results were a bit unreal, especially when attaching to the East or West. So after playing around with some planning software I decided that a hex grid would be ideal and I could use it with all existing artwork with exception to doors. The results seem to be much more consistent. Beyond this, just more of the same. :)
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
The Contest is Over
Labels: aeges road, Aeges Road rpg, contest, video game
Monday, October 6, 2008
Aeges Road, Dialog, Inventory, Shopping, and Change
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Torches, Pitchforks, Action

Monday, August 4, 2008
The Ugly Project
change.So, here are a few screenshots. Yes, artwork is still lacking, but it is coming. A

Saturday, July 19, 2008
Aeges Road: Another Update
Once this is done, I am either going to tweak the AI a bit or start working on NPC interaction. The AI tweaks I am planning are pretty simple. I am essentially doing away with path finding, and moving more towards a hide and seek approach of searching. Path finding worked well, too well. After a while, the AI just seemed too smart to be realistic. By dumbing it down and making it try harder to figure things out, I think it will have a more realistic feel that will lend itself better to role playing. I'll leave the insane AI up to the XCom guys. :)
NPC interaction is going to be a conglomeration of ideas. I was originally going to do a simple Final Fantasy style dialog and run the story very linear, but things have changed. Right after the contest was over I began playing Fallout and Star Trail on dosbox. Fallout got me to thinking about open ended storylines, and with a nudge from this article at Iron Tower Studio I really started to play with the conversation system in Star Trail. My pen is still on the paper planning, but I think the story is going to be much more open ended, and the dialog system is most likely going to be a simplified keyword system. I will talk about this more when I know more myself.
Oh, I almost forgot. Several weeks ago I got doors working. I want to post screens, but I set up a goal to reach before I did this. I also got the scouting skill into operation, and it is working very fluidly with the environment. I had a really cool manipulation done, but due to a major change that I am just dying to talk about, it is on my todo list once again.
