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.