Stu's Rusty Bucket

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Mandolin

I got a new mandolin on the weekend (thanks Nan-nan!), to replace the one I had that didnt quite work. The previous one had some frets inlaid really deeply to the point you couldnt hit some notes without the strings hitting other frets, no matter how high the bridge was set, it was a cheap mando, unfortunately this time, was not even suitable for learning on.

The new one is a Ibanez M511SBS, all solid woods, no ply or such, and yes, I checked all the frets, this one is good to go. Now I just have to get back up to speed and start learning again. You can see Joy’s Alvarez MD90 in the background.
I do need to tighten the nut on the armrest but apart from that…

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Quest Journals

In between drawing some arms and legs (see previous post), Ive been doing some testing on the PSP. Its amazing the little things that show up on there that don’t on the PC. (Porting is not an exact science). I found a couple of really stupid errors, obvious things that really only manifest on the PSP because of how its control pad reacts. Auto repeat is not good in menus, dialogues and quest journals).

Speaking of quest journals, my roguelike has one and I’m thinking of implementing it to augment the current quest journal, only not as verbose as my roguelike.

Right now the quest journal just shows given but not completed quests which you can page through and then completed quests. Each screen has the option to quit out or go to next item. I need to change it to use ‘X’ to quit out or directional pad to scroll through the items instead of buttons to page through…

Thats the basic quest journal, but I want to add something like a game notes. Not something the player can edit but something the game tracks and shows you, example;

On 4th of Foo, year 1203 The Party defeated foobar the great
On 8th of Bar, year 1249 Pinky was turned to stone
On 8th of Bar, year 1249 Foozle died from poisoning
On 30th of Zot, year 1253 Baz was recruited to the party
On 30th of Zot, year 1255 The party accepted the quest to find the hold grail
On 24th of Bar, year 1376 The party entered a moongate

Now the roguelike is more verbose (detailing on move X you did Y etc), but we dont need that kind of granularity. I think the journal notes would be recording bigger events. Not every combat the party undertook but used more as a memoir type thing and using a book type interface drawn with good old pale yellowing paper.

mmm… if I should be able to adapt my CNC code…

mmmm Thinking some more I don’t know if it would really offer anything up to the game. It makes sense in the roguelike but this kind of journal, I dont know for a traditional CRPG....

Think I’ll stick to the quest journal.

Friday, May 02, 2008

The Combat Front

Not a lot of updates on the Fishguts front. Minor minor things really.

I’m going to split out all the combat sprites into their own sprite sheets rather than bung them all onto one large sheet. Its a minimal help for memory consumption and means I can make several versions of the same sprite and not feel guilty about having them all in memory in the one sprite sheet.

I’m still debating (though 95% sold on the below idea) paperdolling to a limited extent, only because the player will always be a humanoid size (so no need to account for dwarf / ogre sizes in paper dolling) .

1 - Need only draw a couple of same size icons
2 - Draw a couple of weapons.

Each sprite will consist of a couple of primary colours (chest colour, arm, leg, boots, hat etc) that the player can cycle through to select.

Once chosen, this sprite will be composed as a flat bitmap and saved as a file on disk, so I don’t have to recompose it each time we go into combat

Lets think it over a bit more.

Players icon is composed of;

1 - Ready/Guard sprite
2 - Attack sprite

That would consist of;

1 - head (bald, hat, short hair, long hair)
2 - torso
3 - arm overlay (see below)
4 - legs
5 - boots

Placement must accommodate any one of

1 - One hand weapon only
2 - One hand weapon and shield
3 - Two handed weapon
4 - Bow
5 - Staff
6 - Nothing

Now right away I can see that a two handed sword selection doesnt mesh with anything else so separate arm overlays will be required…

Each item could have a one or two colour selection.. lets make it a one colour selection, using the ‘bright’ colours and I can map in the second colour for shadow/detail as being its ‘dark’ alternate.
(Those that remember the old ANSI colours or 16 colour paint programs will know what I mean by this).

Looking over this I have immediately made things more complex than I intended, but I think its a good complexity than forcing the player to always have a preset icon…

Now, in an ideal world, and which I may still implement, is have the player choose his primary colours for torso/arms/legs/boots/head and at the start of combat dynamically create the sprite using whatever selected weapon is on hand. That would require recomposition when changing weapons mid combat… that shouldnt be too bad since combat is turn based and not realtime…

Time to get back to work-work and stop thinking game development.

Bump friendly

I’ve made the start town ‘bump friendly’ now, so if you bump into a guard you wont be summarily wiped out. You can still hit ‘a’ to attack and force an encounter but bumping by happenstance wont kill you.

I’m thinking of extending the time give before being kicked out of town, so that the player has more of a chance to see whats in the town than only being able to hit the supply shop first…

Things are slowly progressing nicely toward an 0.5 release