Monday, January 9, 2017

Game Dev Log #3 - Starting to feel like a game!

Edit - This post got a little wordy sorry about that!
Link to Imgur post: http://imgur.com/gallery/dpwei





















Sup guys,

Got some good progress in this week!

Worked on figuring out some of the problems with the state machines for the mob AI. Still no where near where I want it to be. Currently still what I would consider mindless drones. However for now it will work for prototyping.

Next, in an effort to get to more play into the prototype I worked on getting the mobs to actually attack and hurt the player. They still need work, right now they just swarm the player if he's in sight.

While I was working on this I realized I needed a way for the mobs to attack. The premade animations that come with the skeles asset basically required a weapon to look decent so I just dropped the orc sword (used on the player atm as well) on them.Found that they script I wrote for the player hit detection would work fine for them with some simple modifications. Like everything in else wasn't super happy with it but it'll do for now.

Next I started thinking about how I'd actually implement the Stats into the game. I decided a while back that I wanted to use the tried and true stats from paper and pen RPGS. Those being:

  • Strength
  • Dexterity
  • Constitution 
  • Intelligence
  • Wisdom
  • Charisma
  • Luck - I know not typical but I wanted to add it for loot drops.
I use these stats for everything that's alive in the game including the Player. 
The derived stats are: 
  • Health (hit points)
  • Stamina (used for sprinting, weapon swings, actions of any kind)
  • Speed (run speed, swing rate, anything else that I think of along the way)
  • Perception ( this is used alot in the mobs for detecting their targets, I want to work in something that makes the floating HP bars be more of a guess based on the players perception.)
  • Carry weight
  • Alignment - not really derived but that's where it's sitting code wise. 

Now weapons and equipment will have stat bonuses. I am toying with the idea of adding special quests or discoveries that add bonuses as well. I'll build on that at a later date. 

Weapons are going to follow this kind of design. They will have the following fields. 
  • Name & Flavor Text (if applicable) 
  • Type, 1 hand Sword, 2 Hand sword, Spear, as examples. 
  • Primary Stat
  • Secondary Stat
  • Base DMG
I want to use Primary and Secondary stats to provide bonus damage. Primary will add bonus DMG equal to the attribute bonus for that stat. while secondary will add half the attribute DMG. Just a way to make the stats feed into the weapons and maybe help give players some direction on what type of player should use what weapons without adding limits. I hate artificial walls and limits. If I want to play the game in a terrible / broken way, why would the dev want to stop me. I may be doing so to put a challenge on myself or simply for the fun of it. I donno? Maybe that's what games are about!

Anyhow so I built an excel doc to flesh out some weapon ideas and get a feel for how much DMG weapons will do at certain stats. Feels good so far. I want weapons to do a decent amount of DMG so that no matter what weapon you use it's capable to a degree. 

After getting some of the thoughts down on "paper" I started work on getting a system to populate these into the world. I decided that I'll use json text files to hold all the values for weapons, items, questions, community roles, and races. This way it will be easy to update for myself and savvy players can mod them as they see fit. 

I wanted to get a blog post out so I haven't got a video. I may start doing vlogs as well. Could be fun.


TLDR;  Here's what I did!


  1. Fixed AI problems causing AI to suck, getting stuck in states and that kind of thing
  2. Fixed the weapons to hurt the player if wielded by anything other than a player.
  3. Fixed AI to actually attack and deal damage. 
  4. Major progress on Stat system for mobs, Race + Community Role = base range. 
  5. JSON based data structure for easy balancing later and easy modding for players.
Thanks for reading.






Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Game Dev Log #2 - Getting Organized!

Finding direction when first taking on a project can be harder than it seems. You have this huge wall of things you need to work on. Finding the first thing to work on can be hard.

In order to prevent myself from becoming lost and losing focus I decided it would be best to spend some time really thinking out how to proceed. I spent much of the time since the last post trying to plan out the structure in a sensible way. I worked on testing some code inheritance and Interfaces and could really get the result I wanted. I've ended up sticking with a simple Enum + Case switch to manage states. I just have an IEnumerator setup to loop throught it ever Xf seconds.

Here's a link to the Mindmap, Includes everything I'd like to see in the prototype before moving forward. This is prolly the coolest thing yet.
Project #1

First pass on thinking of my Script References and Inheritance.






























Working on coming up with the AI behavior; here's a screen cap of my state machine:

Thanks for reading, if anyone has any suggestions please let me know.

Wednesday, December 28, 2016

Game Dev Log #1 - No name yet

"Hello World"

This started as nothing more than another test bed for me to learn. Now it's becoming something I'd like to actually work on till release. I want to work on an Fantasy RPG world that feels way more alive than any game so far. I know that many games use that kind of talk to market their game. I want even more complex AI. I want to make a game that really makes you feel like a visitor in their world. Seems like a huge scope now but all it really takes is time. I'm not incredibly focused on a game that looks nice. I've always felt that any game can be improved to look better. I want to really focus on game play and making it fell completed in that aspect first.

I have big plans. I'll get core gameplay and systems built, get a good demo level / Scene created, and start looking for some help.

Some details on what I'm working towards:

  • Engine: Unity, C#
  • Single Player RPG
  • open world / sandbox with a Main Quest Line (that isn't World ending massive scale but more personal and not Urgent) with lots of side / one off quests and stories.
  • Compelling AI with many layers of complexity and variance, and response to player actions. I will not have mindless drones that just run up and attack you.
  • I'd like to introduce some fluff features like housing and land ownership with risk/reward

Currently two man team Myself and a 3D artist, eventually I'll expand for more specialized roles specifically:

  1. Animator
  2. More artists both 2D and 3D
  3. Programming
  4. Voice Acting,
  5. Sound/Music,
  6. I have a story guy in mind but I'm not sure he'll be down yet. 


Here's a quick little video showcasing my first funny bug. While thinking of interesting ways to show how full a barrel is I ran into moving center of Mass.
Well scaling + moving the center of mass = Barrelkin. My first novelty mob that will be passive and roam, or should I say flop, in herds.


Thanks for reading, Way better posts will being coming in the future. Just need a jumping off point.