The Unborn Children

No one is certain where these children came from. All at once they began to appear, just like the mist creeping out of the trees into a moon lit field. They were frail, and starved. Many more had not made it this far, and they all were missing the sign of birth on their stomach. The people of Chalt were immediately taken aback by a trance that was slowly overtaken by a nauscious feeling in the pit of their stomach. When the children spotted the villagers, they all froze as fear glazed their eyes. Silence was only challenged by the airy howl of the wind through the trees. This moment seemed to go on for days, no one moved.

It took the courage of a young girl to bring us all back to reality. With a small voice she looked up at her father and pleaded, “We have to help them!” Our first efforts were unfruitful. They scurried back into the trees any time we approached. It was decided that food would be brought out to the tree line and left there for the children. Maybe in time they would come around.

Months had passed and the children had broken past the barrier of the tree line and begun wondering parts of the village, though never letting anyone too close. The children had become a welcome part of everyday life, well, apart from a little mischief. Unfortunately, our time time with the children was cut too short.

The watch came to me in the middle of the night and reported a hooded figure moving around in the shadows just South of the village. Even though he knew he had been seen but he refused to come out into the open, he just waited, and watched.

It was nearly day break, and near where they were watching the stranger another figure began to appear in the first light. Whatever it was, it was huge, twice as high as any hut in the village with a human like figure and horns covering its eyes. As men rushed toward the village to warn everyone the beast sprung into action. From out of nowhere fire sprung from the ground and scorched the men. Before they could gather themselves up the beast was upon, a few from its claws and it was all over.

By this time the village was astir, every man at arms, positioning themselves between the beast and the village. The source of the fires became evident as we watched the stranger raise his arms in command of the flames. Once again the beast reached the men as they were recovering from the impact of the fires. The children ran out of the woods and did just as the stranger had, raising their arms and consuming the beast in flames. This was obviously why the stranger was here, he was here for the children. The strangers attention was now focused souly on them. Once again he raised his arms, this time vines sprung form the ground and began entangling everyone in the village as well as the children. We all watched helplessly as more beasts came from the woods and carried the children away never to be seen again.

Signed

Elder Masious of the Chalt Village

Aeges Road Weekly Update

The orcs finally duked it out this week. I only found 6 hours to work on the project this week, but thing went pretty good. As usual, there was a lot of bug squashing that resulted from the new functionality meeting my old code. There were also some convenient UI improvements that make mouse movement much more friendly with fewer path failures. Now you really have to click out in the void to fail a path.

Here is the list of completed combat items from this week:

• Melee Attack

• Movement

• Defense

• Death

• Timers

Now, here is the list to be accomplished this week:

• Messaging

• Correct Combat Animations

• Magic (fingers crossed)

• Momentum (Partially finished)

• Experience (Partially finished)

• Game Over

And here is the list that will be put off for a while:

• Equipment Change

• Level Up

Not too bad for six hours. I had a bit of time to work on more character art, and I am getting closer to finding all three main characters, as well as a few villains. I am getting very excited and antsy to get the main parts of the program done so I can start level building.

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.

Where Do All These Buttons Come From?

This week has been a week of small thrills. No new functionality has entered the game this week, but a lot of preparation work for just that has been done.

While I could have started working on the combat system this week (or so I keep thinking), I decided to get the artwork ready for the combat system. I find myself much more motivated when things look good. Of course, this meant drawing lots of little buttons and logos for each and every little option while taking a few of the standard shortcuts here and there. While I was generally happy with the turn out, there were two logos that are still on my mind. They are horrid, and they need replaced. One is the menu button logo for the stats screen. It's just a percent sign. All my other logos are nice little pieces of artwork, but this one is just a percent sign. The other is the logo for the skills page. It is simply “x:x”. While I am running with it now, I hope to have these improved in the near future.

Anyway, if you have an idea feel free to share it publicly on this blog. Your efforts will be greatly rewarded with my gratitude and an e-pat on the back. :-)

I have also been working on website for the game. I had a template made up early on in the competition, but was very unhappy with the look. I was also undecided on a few game at issues and decided to wait. I am glad I did, I scrapped the original template and built a new one last night. While the template isn't perfect yet, it is close enough and I plan on launching the site soon. Now if I can just get a good idea for a company logo I can replace the old clunker site from my former domain.

Oh yeah, I also finished the logo for Aeges Road. Here it is.

Reclaiming the Time

What a week it has been. Path finding on multiple levels has become a success, giving Aeges Road a 3d-ish feel. There is also a bit of AI programmed now which allows a character to wonder somewhat predictably. There are several next steps I had planned to work on, but needed to make some serious decisions before doing any more scripting. While making these decisions, reviewing past progress, and re-enrolling for college, reality has sunk in.

After some implementations I have come to realize (and somewhat anticipated) that the time is not available to accomplish all of the goals set by the design document. So, in order to reclaim the ability to finish, many things are being scaled down. My once 19 character professions has been narrowed down to 9. While I have almost as many skills, they are no longer the juggling act they were trying to balance them out to 19. The stats have not changed, and luckily, my once completed character creation system just needs some minor modifications to reflect the changes.



I have been wanting to post more screenshots of what I have been doing, so here they are. This first one shows the height values of the isometric terrain. A full height change takes a value of 2, making a change of one a half change that is traversed differently in path finding. I want to make the transition of a half change a hop, but have not gotten around to it yet.




This is the original profession tree screen within the original idea of the character screen. While I was happy with how it was beginning to look, I wanted a different look and ultimately dropped the entire idea. However, being the pack rat I am, I kept an entire copy of this in case I decide to make a darker themed game in which this would be appropriate.




Aeges Road 2 may feature all of these professions, but for the sake of completion, they have been narrowed down to this. This is also getting very close to the look and feel I want to accomplish. I always like the Secret of Mana style menus that would swirl around the players head, and loved the way Cronotrigger traversed the different character screens. I have tried to perform a mix of the two with a bright theme to get something that should capture the personality I want this game to have.




And this last one is a just a quick traversal demo I made of the base stats in no particular order. Since skill development is directly linked to professional choice, I made sure to keep the options open on the base stats. While each profession will experience different costs to increase on each stat, any stat will be affordable at any level with any profession.

Sure, there are a lot of features I would like to see, but I would much rather see them in the next release than to push release back too far or to fail to release. I am actually quite happy with the results. My design document is now more complete than ever, and by next weekend I hope to have a design document that is truly ready for moving forward into a more productive development cycle.