The Aeges Road Weekly Update

There are a few exciting developments in progress here at Code Ugly. While production took a dive this week due to college starting back up, I was pleasantly surprised with how much time I was able to make for the project. I was even more surprised to see how quickly certain things came together.



Visual game concepts were not vast, but certain things did shape up this week. Several menu items and other UI components got finished and polished earlier this week. There is still more to go, but since I had enough art to proceed, I began working on combat. I don't believe I have been very open with the combat system beyond the fact that it is turn based, so allow me reveal some things.

Combat is going to strategic While this is not a full blown strategy RPG, it borrows many elements from the cross genre. One important element is multi-height tile based combat and character movement. All actions are based on action points (AP). Some terrains take more AP than others, and certain combat options suck more up as well. For now, I am toying with the idea of making movement possible before and after an attack, allowing a player to use up all the AP available. Of course, this option is open to your opponent too.



Experience is gained through individual actions. A successful blow will gain you experience, as will a successful evade or parry. As of right now, I do not plan on a party experience gain at the end of battle, but I am open to the idea if level gains prove too hard in testing.

The combat portion of the game is about a quarter of the way finished. Most of the work I have done on it this week involved range and area finding as well as making stat and rule changes in the code. The exciting thing is that combat is already playable with some options. I have been testing killing orcs in Melee combat for the last few days. :-)



I have several next steps lined out, some of which may be completed tonight. While I have combat timers working for all combatants, the player must wait on a static screen of stats. Making some nice looking timers for each combatant to show their individual countdown is on the list. Hopefully this and music will be enough to keep things interesting during wait periods. I never knew how long 5 seconds could really take. :-)

I am also planning on getting ranged combat to take into consideration blocking objects and elevation. I seriously doubt the magic system gets done this week, but next weekend looks promising. I have noticed my biggest time wasters are silly mistakes in the code. I was close to writing in a bug for a reverse logic error I thought I was getting until I realized I was the one looking at things backwards.



Well that's almost it for this week. As I hope you have noticed, I have posted some of the character concept art I have been working on this week. Well, I say I. I am getting some good critique from someone who just might wind up joining me on the art side of this project.