Finding My Way Around

The past two weeks have definitely been an educational journey. Getting path finding to work took a while, but after a week I was able to get it refined and polished for collision detection on a flat surface. This week I have been busy making severe modifications to the path finder in order to have multiple levels on the map.

Getting the height based path finding to work was a trick, but fairly easy. The hard part has been getting path following to work with the multiple height terrain. I am now in the process of re-writing the entire structure I have been using in order to handle player movement. The new method makes for much smoother movement, and much more accurate path completion. The problem is weeding out all the old methods that are working against the new system.

I expect to spend the week tweaking and modifying the system until it resembles something semi-professional looking, and then moving on to artificial intelligence and getting a fight started. It may be a few weeks, but things are looking good.

Here is a quick update on a few areas of the game.

Planning: 80%
Rule System: 90%
Character Creation: 100%
Level Up: 50%
Inventory Management: 40%
Character Graphics: 0%
Terrain Graphics: 5%
Item Graphics: 0%
Path Finding: 100%
Path Following: 75%
AI: 0%
Storyline: 15% --> On paper anyway.

Getting Things Done vs Getting Things Decided

Well, I guess it's time to make a report of what has progressed since my last post. I have been working on both graphics and the stats system. So far, I have a fully working character creation screen, still needs some UI tweaks and character graphics, but for now, done. I have had to add one stat since turning in my design doc, and made a few other changes as I began to realize just how boring the system plan was. I discussed it on another blog, http://www.rampantgames.com/blog/ and felt pretty good afterwards about the consequences of a design doc change.

The biggest change was going from having no character professions, to having 19 character professions. While I still have not finished balancing each class, I have gotten the starting 3 professions like I want them for creation and level up. I am very excited by what I was able to achieve, and a friend of mine told me that he had never seen a class tree quite like this one, so I hope it might be different enough just to have the appearance of being something new. :-) That would be cool!

Unfortunately, this is the only thing I have made fully functional. I have made a semi-working inventory and equipment system, a semi working level up system, a semi working character screen, and 3 partial test levels with 3 different partial sets of test graphic styles that I have been working on. I also have one character semi-finished on paper, she still needs some work, but I am getting closer. Art was not my strong suit, but hopefully my hands and eyes will quickly learn to get along better. I have been drawing characters out of how-to books for the good part of a month in my free time.

There are two new graphics applications that I am testing out right now that may speed graphics development considerably. If I decide to use them I will be posting them soon. They both have free versions, but I would want to use the updated commercial versions if I use them for the game.