BirdofPrey Posted:
Hey dudes! It’s been a ridiculously long time since I updated this thread, and I think it’s only fair to let you know how things are standing right now.
Since this is a long bum post, I’m gonna break it up into two parts – some major design changes I’ve made, and then some more conventional updates telling you guys how the coding is going.
DESIGN
So, about a month ago, I finally admitted to myself that attempting to create a sprawling, ADOM-scale project isn’t fair to either me or you guys. Mainly because it would literally take years to finish. As such, I’ve decided to narrow down the scale to that of a normal Roguelike: one quest and one main dungeon.
I’ve got the basics of the plot and the general theme and content worked out. I think I might keep that to myself though for now, (I want to leave some mystery in this project > ) I’ll reveal certain things as they become relevant to the coding process, of course.
The general setting is still going to be mostly fantasy, but I’m trying to stay as far away from mindless fantasy stereotypes as possible. One of my goals in this project is to create a coherent and interesting world, as I may use the same setting for other Roguelikes or my big-scale one somewhere down the road.
Don’t get me wrong though – even though I’ve severely scaled down the scope of the game, it’s still going to take a very long time to complete. With school and work going on, I can only spend 1-2 hours on it every day, though I am getting pretty good at working on it regularly. The change doesn’t mean it’ll be playable in a few weeks, it means it’ll be some months instead of some years.
CODING
Things I’ve changed since last time:
– I’ve actually undone some of my work on menus, and re-simplified it to make it less of a hbumle and more intuitive. For now, it’s back to single-choice menus, but if I think it’s necessary later on it won’t be difficult to re-implement multiple choice menus.
– The player isn’t lonely anymore! I created the game time & timer system, and there are now other creatures running around the dungeon, taking turns with the player. It’s a little too early to call them enemies yet, since I’m still in the process of coding the ATTACK action and the only AI they have is a function that chooses a random direction for them to walk in.
Most recently, I’ve just about finished fixing a major structural/organizational problem in the code relating to in-game actions. There’s no need to go into the fine details, but the gist of the issue was there was no real differentiation between actions and meta-actions. Actions being clearly defined actions that an actor carries out in the game that has an actual bearing on the game world, and meta-actions are either actions that have no effect on the game world, or ambiguous actions that need clarification before they can be applied. For example, viewing your inventory is a meta-action since it has no effect on the game world itself. From the inventory menu however, there may be context-sensitive uses for items, in which case the meta-action of viewing your inventory could be turned into a tangible game action.
The result was functional, but messy, problematical code that would have proved to be a huge headache later on. Hell, I only have 5/6 functional actions right now and I’ve been fixing it up for almost 4 hours now and I’m still not quite done (i will be soon though). Even though it’s taken me so long to do something that has no visible effect on game, it still feels like a big accomplishment, mainly because the revised code is now probably the most stable code I have in the game right now. A lot of the code I have right now is going to have to be changed a fair amount before the final release, but the way I have actions right now, I can’t see any reason I would have to change it besides some very minor tweaks and additions.
Up next:
– Finish cleaning up that organizational problem mentioned above, and make sure things are working smoothly
– Work out exactly how I want combat to be implemented and finish the attack action
– Create a status area in the bottom of the screen for important player stats such as HP, etc.
– Implement a very basic monster AI – just monsters wandering around until they see you, at which point they’ll move in to attack you
So that’s that for now. I’ll try to update this thread a little more often, so I don’t have to write essays every time.
