2/25/18 Development Update

Hello all, and welcome to another development update. For this week, I chose to focus on a few things. The first of course being controller support. This week, support has been added to the game menus which includes functionality for the quest menus, spellbook and bestiary. You can now use the controller to scroll and select items in each of these game menus. Additionally, functionality has also been added to the special rooms, which include treasure chests and Arcana fonts along with all the tooltips associated with them. With these changes, most if not all of the combat dungeon crawling elements now have controller support. Yay! Moving forward I will also begin working on the other interfaces in the game namely the hero soul system, the deck building system, alchemy system and shop.

Next, I have also begun concepting and designing a new boss fight for the Mier Mines dungeon. As of right now I have implemented about half of the fight and I have to say it's looking good! Though it is still a little soon to say, I'll just have to wait and see how all the mechanics interplay with each other when I'm ready to test the fight.

Finally, I had more animations done for the currently implemented character, Cecilia. She now has fully animated spear dashes. On that note I've also begun talking with my artist in order to create other characters to help with another feature I am looking forward to adding, the companion system. More on that later when I begin working on it.

That's it for this week! See you guys next week.

2/19/18 Development Update

Hi, welcome back to another weekly update. Let's get right down to it, this week is a continuation of last week's work to bring controller support to my game. As of right now, support for using player inventory including all menus associated with the inventory has been implemented. Additionally, support for interacting with special rooms, ie Arcana Fonts and treasure chests have also been implemented.

On that note, I ran into an interesting design problem on how to transition the mouse targeting Arcana spells to the controller. Last week, I had a script that emulated the mouse cursor, but have decided to discontinue that idea due to problems with compatibility. Instead, I came up with my own solution to the problem that works virtually the same if not better than the last version. Additionally, I've begun to work on bringing support to the major shop menus as well as the deck building menu and talent menus. In short, bringing controller support to my game is moving along pretty smoothly all things considered, but there is still more work to be done.

I also had another presentation of my game at a demo night, which went pretty well. I got some more people testing as well as giving me some interesting ideas to toy around with. More on that next week hopefully.

Not really much else to report this week. It's really been retrofitting my old controls and UI to support the controller. ^_^"

2/11/18 Development Update

Hi and welcome back to another weekly update for my game, Hero Soul! First I'd like to thank everyone who made it out on Tuesday to playtest my game at the Playcrafting Winter Expo! I had a lot of fun talking with you guys!

For this week, I chose to focus on adding game controller support to my game. This is because during the expo I noticed that many people were not used to using the keyboard and mouse. So, as of thee end of this week many of the actions you can do now with the keyboard and mouse can now be done with an XBox 360 controller. This was actually a pretty fun thing to do, as I've never worked with the controller in Unity before and it was quite interesting learning how it worked.

For the most part, converting the movement controls and the combat were not very difficult, however when thinking how to convert the game mechanics such as certain Arcana Cards' effects or using the inventory menu was an interesting problem I had fun solving. For instance for Arcana cards that use the mouse to aim, you can now also use the right joystick to aim on the Xbox controller. However, as mentioned earlier I found that converting the inventory system I had currently had in place a challenge when converting to the controller, and this ate up most of my time this week. Though after struggling with it for a bit, I am proud to say that using the controller to navigate the inventory and other menus works if not better that with the mouse, but I'll let the player decide that one.

Overall, most of the things you can do in game can now be controlled with the gamepad, however there is still quite of bit of testing ahead of me to fully integrate the controller support. Please look forward to more updates regarding this.

2/4/18 Development Update

Welcome to another development update. For this week, along with testing and tuning of the quest and Soul systems, I focused on preparing the game for playtesting during the Playcrafting Winter Expo this Tuesday.

So first up, the sprite work I had requested was completed. This involves the addition of attack animations for the main character, though, the special attack still needs to be animated. The goal of this switch from the old attack animations to the new ones is because I thought it was awkward seeing the weapon sprite animate whereas the player sprite remained static. I hope this will make combat have more weight behind it and moving forward I want to animate more attacks.

Next up, I made changes to how Arcana Cards are discovered. Originally, cards were discovered 1 at a time, randomly, at Arcana Fonts that spawn in dungeons. The problem with this design is that it was kind of unfulfilling and highly based on randomness. So to remedy this, Arcana Fonts will now display 3 random cards, and players will then choose the one they want and in addition to unlocking the card, will receive 1 copy of the card. Like the previous iteration, cards will still be random, so you can still receive repeats of cards you already own, however now you will have some agency when building your deck as well as lessening the impact of getting repeat cards.

Finally, as I mentioned in previous posts, I've begun working on the new zone. Partially this is because showing off the forest every week is kind of getting bland but also to assist in the implementation of dungeon hazards. In order to spice dungeons up, aside from killing things I want to mix things up adding small puzzles or hazards in addition to killing enemies. For example in the cave level, some rooms will have a bat swarm hazard in which periodically areas will be swarmed by bats, hindering the player's movement. Hopefully through the implementation of these hazards new avenues of play which will emphasize good positioning.

That's it for this week! I'm excited to get people's opinion during the event this week.

1/28/18 Development Update

Hello all! This is going to be a light development update as I was busy this week. Though, I did get some work done. Let's get started shall we?

Last week I showed the layout of the guild building. This week I have begun implementing the functionalities of the guild building. Mainly, the guild building will be the main source of side quests for the player and as such I implemented the guild board. The guild board will be where players pick up quests to do. Moving forward these quests will vary town to town and be random.

Finally, the last explorable part of the town of Weiss has been created, the town pub. And like pubs in other games, will be a place where players can meet characters, hear rumors, and possible find some extra side quests to do.

Looking forward, more tuning and testing of the questing system as well as the hero soul will have to be done, so look forward to a revisit to these systems in the future. Additionally, with many of the mechanics and system now implemented story development will now begin so you can also look forward to some lore/world building in future posts! That's it for this week I look forward to seeing you next week!

1/21/18 Development Update

Welcome to another weekly development update for my game Hero Soul! For this week I worked on the starter town. To start off, I created some more insides of buildings. Pictured below is the inside of the Adventurer Guild building. In this building players will be able to accept quests using the new quest system I implemented last week. With this building, the Starter Town of Weiss gets closer to being complete. In addition, I also began to populate the town creating NPCs with some dialogue. While the NPC's are rather simple now, I hope to add more complexity to them by adding different behaviors and dialogue options.

Moving on, I also finished and implemented the shopping system of the game, which I have been procrastinating for quite some time now. As you can see below the system is heavily inspired off the shop system in WOW. With the system you can buy, sell, and buyback items from multiple vendors. In addition every vendor will have their own special items you can purchase for a limited time. These special items will change as time passes so buy them when you can!

With the shop system in place, most of the planned/intended features have now been implemented and I am now making the transition to content creations/ story development.

1/14/18 Development Update

Hello and welcome to another development update for my game Hero Soul! This week has been another productive week as I can now (for the most part) check 3 more things off the to-do list.

To start, the actual "Hero Soul" mechanic has been for the most part finished. So what is the Hero Soul you might ask? The Hero Soul is a power that the main character will possess that allows them to draw from the experiences of heroes before them. What this means gameplay-wise is a talent tree system where players can select talents from 6 heroes (for now) and can be seen below.

Essentially, there are 6 different talent trees which the players can choose from. What is different about this is that the 6 different trees are not static. As you can see above the skills are broken into tiers which are available every 5 levels. For every tier, players can preview what each unique tree has available at that tier and then select which hero's tier they want. For instance, a player can pick the tier 1 talents of the berserker hero, but then select the vanguard talents for tier 2. This system was designed in a way to promote many different permutations, and as this system further develops I would further like to refine the trees to promote more synergies between the trees.

Outside of the hero soul talent selection, in game your selected talents will be shown in the inventory menu along with the description of what the talent does.

The next major system implemented is questing and quest tracking. Using the menu pictured below in the upper right, players will have access to the the quest log. It's heavily inspired off the classic WCIII quest log, which differentiates between the main quests (left) and side quests (right).

In addition to the quest system, I also implemented the bestiary system. Whenever a new monster is killed, the player will gain access to the bestiary entry, which will give information about the monster killed. This includes the items they drop, their health, and their weaknesses.

That's it for this week! Moving forward, I would like to flush out the "Hero Soul" system more, refining the hero talent trees and trying to make them unique.