New Viewangle and recreation of a whole concept.

New perstective

As we discussed about changing the perspective of the game for different reasons ive completly forgot to update the blogpost.

But since there wasnt anything to show for real ill give a short list of things we wanted to change.

As we diskussed we call the current movment 4D movment for 4 Directions movment.
Games like Pokemon, Zelda and Secrets of Grindea use such directional systems.
But there are also the so called 2D movment, which is used by games like Super Mario World, Kirby and Witchmarsh

For the clearance the 2D movment looks little like and what 4D movment looks like

4D Movment

 (Picture from Secrets of Grindea)

2D Movment

(Picture from Witchmarsh)

Now we've diskussed the pros and cons about those 2 Types of design.

The pros for 4D movment

• More explorable area
• easier to design per tilesets
• casual rpg look for 2D rpg

The pros for 2D movment

• Easier sprite animations (need just 1 animation. 4D needs 3 different)
• More describing enviroment (backgrounds, high etc )
• More team based combat trough keeping people together.

The votings ive started.

GameDesigners group
4D 6
2D 2

Indie Game Developers
4D 3
2D 7

Secrets of Grindea Forum
4D 1
2D 3

TOTAL
4D 10
2D 12

As far as i think this votings just showed us that 2D and 4D design is nearly on the same i want that level. So the design idea fell for my decision to 2D for giving more power to the animations.

New type of level designs needed.

As we tought about this new type of design we also need more level design.

Therefore i made up some ideas i knew from games like.

 

This shows basically the use of some diffrent kinds of doors.

For one we have the side doors that normally activate if you walk trough them. Or you have to open them via pressing the interact button by standing next to them.

Also we have the normal Doors, these doors can be passed trough by pressing the up button, or to open them the up + interact button.

Also there are Semitrough plattform objects, you can jump trough and stand on them.
Also by pressing Down + Jump youll fall trough.

This solves some problems for example by making a Village with some houses.

You use the Doors and draw the houses in the background so you can simply pass by and walk trough the village.
Also some sideways are possible for each door represents the passtrough to another map.

First to now ive to change huge parts of the AI and of the Controls to fit the new system.

Also Williams needs to draw some templates and Evans needs to draw the new backgrounds and some tiles for the plattforming. But for the first level which takes place in the woods we need some ideas for the leveldesign for a tutorial level.

Thanks for now and stay tuned till next week.

Preperation for the Arcade mode

First of all we tought it would be nice to have soon some real gameplay.
As our RPG is very huge project we can't just implement the first Storypart
right ahead and giving out some tech demo.
So we've come up with the Arcade mode idea inspired from Secrets of Grindea.

The idea is simple, if you fail youll have to start over.
But the main game mechanic of our Arcademode will be based upon cards, which are determining the
Battlearea.

 While im desperatly programming the routines for the arcade mode, Nina is drawing some
pictures for future trees, which will be pixeled down by Evan, to improve the look of the objects ingame. Also ill add a routine to make the trees and other objects become Gameobjects to improve the over/underlayering of the players and check the collision.

Also she has drawn some idea for monsters. Example the Tapivis below.
It lives in fluids and if a player is in melee range it attacks. If he's to far away it throws waterballs at
him.

Due to the fact that Paul has a vacation there are no new tilesets or static objects but this here.

Its a pixelart drawing i think as furniture for interior maps.

The plan will be as following, we will finish 5 Enemies (and 1 Bosstype of each.)
And then we will working on the Arcade, so i can hunt down bugs, improve performance and
get the game some gameplay.

What is left on my list of todo's:

1.Implement the rapidfireattack.
2.Implement the charged attack.
3.Add at least 2 Weapons and 3 Skills.
4.Add the cardsystem for the Arcademode.
5.Add some fancy floor/room animation for showing which room it is.
6.Getting sound effects to the client on multiplayer.
7.Implement the new planttyped enemie and the waterenemie.
8. Implement bossversions of all existing enemies.
9.Add them to th e Arcadesystem.
10.Finetuning.

William is currently working on the template for male and female humans.

His working cue includes:

The plantenemy.
The Template for females.
The clothes for the beginnings.
The attackposes.
The waterenemy.
Some fireanimation.
Some wateranimation.
etc.

Pauls working cue includes the new static objects.
Stones, Trees, etc.
and more of his textures for the tileset.

Nina's working cue includes the drawing of new static objects and some enemies.

As i think the first very alpha playable techdemo of some arcade gameplay will take 3-4 months to complete for us, because there is very much to do, but we'll try our best to give soon some new feedback of how the progression looks like.

Thanks for reading and as finishing piece of candy for this week we have some
earth animation from William.

New Enemies, the SWARM is comming

First of all this week we all had much to do in designing some enemies.
Because we want to make each enemy somehow unique, so the players have to think how to fight them it took quite a while to script the AI, and the sprites took William Priest also a lot of work effort to make.

A third enemy is already in progression.

Nao's Heart:

Nao's Heart is a Leafcreature which drops a cloud of pollen at each hop it does.
Its a shy creature which flees from the player if its too close.
Because it drops the pollen clouds at his back its a bad idea to pursue it.
Best you should fight it from the frontal.
Alone it is nearly harmless but  this enemy can be very dangerous in combination with other enemies.

Wasp:

Wasps took me quite a while to script Oo.
The basic idea was to programm a swarm intelligence.
At first each wesp is his own leader.
Basically if two wesps are near to each other, one will become an underling of the other.
So the leading wasp is the head of a swarm, which includes the commando.
The leading wasp determines the target and the time when the other wasps attack.
Also the other wasps try to stay within a certain distance to their leader.
A waspswarm can have up to 8 underlings and one leader.

If the leader dies all wasps are their own leader and form swarms again.

Also for debugging purposes i  changed the color of the leader to red and set debuging lines
The blue ones show which underling is following which leader.
The red ones show which target a wasp has.

Other stuff:

As one can see in the gif files above we also have some new tiles and some tilesets and some new Sprites.

Some tilesets from Paul Evans :

And we have a Logo made by Nina Rogg :

Last but not least i wanted to show a nice gif William Priest has made.

New crewmembers

For some days now the work is ongoing again and i resumed the scripting in the GML. Also we have a new crewmember, Paul Evans, which is responsible for the awesome work at the tilesets, that will create in near future the maps. Here is one of his current tilesets, and he rapidly increases them. As he worked at the tiles and objects in the game i scripted a collision system which should allow to detect collision with not trespassable objects like walls, trees etc. (Its an upgrade of the currently system i used for Players and NPCs.) Also ive written down some of the main concepts of the game for getting more structure at my planning, and for discussing them among the team.

Also there are some pictures my girlfriend drew for me to determine the some of the races in the game Felidae(Catman) left middle are Electrons and the right one is a Plantae(Plantman)

In total the Game might have 4 till 9 Races (Depending on the effort of implementing them) Ideas and concepts are availiable for

Humans=> Standard...

Felidae => A catman race which is known for their dexterity, they are humble and religious. Also their medicine is the best.

Machina => Started as kind of a slave race their fate depends on the choices of the player (they were manmade)

 Electron => A science loving community of energy based lifeforms. Also they deny the existance of any gods.

Spectrals => They might be what we all become after death. They are a mysterious race of magic creatures .

Plantae => are quite natureloving creatures which are fighting for the life of each beeing. They hate machina and Electrons.

Diabolos => They are a mystical race and very rare, they always want the world to keep on changing.

Angelus => They are basically the opposite of Diabolos, they are trying to protect the status quo from changes.

Interupting the development for unknown time

Due to some reasons i have to interrupt the development for certain weeks.
I'm changing the university i am studying on so i have to move my habitat and therefore i need some time.
Also i am invited to test Secrets of Grindea in Beta, and to do this right i also need some time to search for bugs.

But i will update a Blogg with some of the Beta Gameplay, for those of you to see that it is not dead. And as soon as i have time to go on i will continue the work on Timelines
(Betablog http://ark626beta.blogspot.de/)

For all of you that are wondering "What the heck is Secrets of Grindea?!?"
Check their development block: http://www.secretsofgrindea.com/index.php/dev-blog
It is a pretty nice game which has elements from old school games like Legend of Zelda, Secret of Mana etc. And the sprites are very very smooth designed and look pretty nice.

Tomorrow i will upload some beta gameplay to present the game and show you a little but not to much of it.

Until then stay tuned.

Attacks and AI updates

This weeks updates

This weeks updates featuring the three implemented attacks as templates.
First of all i wanted to thank the guys of Secrets of Grindea for showing me how i am able to make cute gifs like they have on their blog.

You should check it out. http://www.secretsofgrindea.com/index.php/dev-blog

Normal attack:

The first attack template i will show you is the normal fire which most of you have already seen
it comes up if you press the primary attack button.

Charged attack:

The second attack i will present is the charged attack. It will come if you press and hold the primary attack button until it is charged and then release it if you want to fire.
The template of the character while charging isnt there, thats why you can only see the name of the template char.

Rapid fire:

Last but not least i will present the rapidfire attack. The attack will show while you press and hold the secondary attackbutton and as long as you hold it the character will fire rapidly until you release it or until your stamina runs out. (also here no rapid fire template for the char)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A.I. for NPC's:

Here is some gif featuring the A.I. i am working on.
Because there is not much to see i will explain what it does.
The A.I. has a circle in each direction (to its left/right/back/forwart)
Each circle can be seperatly set so the enemy can "see" things in front of him which are for example 50 pixels away but not if they are 50 pixels behind the npc.

The A.I. in the gif below prusues a Player if he "sees" it but if the NPC's loses track of the Player it stops pursuing.
Additional the A.I. is trying to keep a the distance between itself and the player between a min and a max value.

Thanks for watching (feedback is welcome)

Ranged Attacks and Weapon Stats

This week ive implemented ranged weapons.
Also the weapons influence now the stats.

Also if you skill the the magic elements like fire, ice, darkness etc. you will get those skills also as "Weapons" meaning you can equip them as primary weapon, as secondary weapon and as quick skill
Below you see a gif showing a shot from the laser pistol.

Furthermore i currently am learning all about pathfinding to check if the npcs should have a fuzzy logic to move, attack, flee and prusu the players or if an intelligent algorithm is the better idea.

For those of you who are interested in the an explanation check the link below
http://www.policyalmanac.org/games/aStarTutorial.htm

Furthermore the core mechanics for the shieldskill, the normal attack, the charged attack and the rapidfire attack , are implemented.

How do they work?

There are two attack keys. The primary and the secondary key.
If you press the primary key you will make a normal attack.
If you press the primary key and hold it for a time it will charge and when you release it you will perform a charged attack. (primary key will use primary weapon)
If you press and hold the secondary key you will perform rapidfire attacks as long as you hold the key and as long as you have stamina. (secondary key will use secondary weapon)

Also there is a shieldbutton. Depending on the equipped shield skill it will drain your stamina as long as you hold it or only drain stamina if your shield deflects an incoming attack.


Also we have a pretty nice video featuring the Gun and a flamethrower in early development.

Lastly i want to add what is upcoming:

I will work on the Skill point spending system, also i will sharpen the battle mechanics.
The battle should be more smooth.