3/12/18 Development Update

Hello and welcome back to another development update.

For this week I chose to take a step back from working on the boss mentioned last week and focus on adding a long requested feature, companions. Companions are designed to function similar to the ones in the Secret of Mana series of games. Moving forward players will be able to pick and choose which companion they want accompanying them, each with their own unique skills.

This week I programmed the basic behaviors for the companions including following the player and acquiring and fighting enemies. Doing most of this was pretty easy, however, I noticed that the companion like the enemy AI constantly got stuck on terrain.

So in addition to getting the basic companion AI completed, I also began work on making some more advanced AI pathing algorithms. The way I did this can be sen below, using a derivative of nodal pathfinding, where the AI will go from valid node to valid node until it reaches the destination. The nodal system can be seen below, where the green lines are passable terrain and red impassible.

Writing the algorithm was a pretty fun experience, and more work still needs to be put into it. The plan for it is to not only make the companion AI smarter, but also the enemy AI.

That's it for this week! 

3/5/18 Development Update

Hello and welcome to another development update. The bulk of this week's work has gone into the creation of the boss for the Mier Mines dungeon. I started working on this boss last week, and since then it has gone through a lot of testing and changes, and in truth most of the work went into tweaking the fight so that it feels good and conceptually works with the boss.

So after many iterations I chose to move away from the initial concept of the boss being some sort of slime that takes the player's shape. I chose to move away from this since we already have a slime like enemy with the Slime King. This made me settle on the current iteration of the shade which takes shape based on the player, changing based on the character you choose. As it is now I am happy with most of the mechanics, though I am still tweaking to make the fight feel better conceptually.

Moving forward I'd like to finish and finalize the fight, as well as begin work on the companion system as well as bringing more controller support to the game.

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!