Cutscene Outline Done Up Through Chapter 3

Title says it all.

I'm planning on writing more of the story in detail as we get more of our game infrastructure up and running. This will probably not happen in earnest until A term break, since I will have nothing but free time really.

Vrell's Underground Research Facility Completed

Vrell's Underground Research Facility is now completed, at least completed enough to be usable.

Opal Street (Day) Finished

The streets of Opal during the day is now finished.

Houston, we have Prototype

Prototype is retooled from last week's. Minor bumps to stats here and there. General map layout is the same.

Cutscene Manager still needs to be merged with portraits, haven't heard from Shane about that though.

Cutscene Manager has some minor refactors done, to make the code easier to understand and use.

Movement and Attacking Changed

Movement range and legal spaces to move are now always visible to the player. When the player is not moving they can see what units they can attack (within range) and cycle through different attacks to see the ranges. Also we now allow players to move through players, and enemies can move through enemies.

Going forward we will be improving the AI and also working on the character specific classes. These classes will be in regards to the actual main characters in the story and they will each have their own classes. Also we will work out how to manage story flags along with those classes.

Refactoring Some Cutscene Code

Decided to do a refactor of my cutscene code to encapsulate each cutscene's entire dialogue within one automated method call.

Almost have it working completely the same, just can't get the cutscene stopping to work right.

This refactor will enhance readability of code as well as make it much easier to add cutscenes into our game.

Victory Fanfare Music

I finished composing my own victory fanfare music using Sibelius 7. The audio file had about 7 seconds of silence afterwards for some reason. So I had to import it into Ableton Live in order to decrease the length of the track to 5 seconds.

Gunshot Sound Effects

I looked up a tutorial on YouTube and made two sound effects in Ableton Live 9 Suite.

Chapter 3's Out of Combat Narrative In Place

I decided to really buckle down and write out all of Chapter 3's out of combat dialogue yesterday. In it, Faryll and his group succeed in defeating the Archdrake. As Soanshi appears to reveal that she was the architect of her father's demise before finishing him off, however, Faryll draws his blade and kills Soanshi as she was a cruel and callous girl who couldn't be trusted to watch over the Lantern in a peaceful Arkehlm. As one might expect, Naiah, bearing witness to this, is driven berserk with despair and rage. Faryll has a difficult choice to make, as Naiah is adamant in pursuing Faryll's death, which could threaten the existence of a peaceful Arkehlm as she has the strongest rights to controlling the Lantern and the Drakes. You'll have to read it for yourself to see what happens next.

Vrell's Underground Research Facility Established

Vrell's Research Facility is now established. The image depicts some sort of room, with a large type of machine in the center that contains the Tox disease. More work will be done in the following week.

Paper Prototype Pretty Prepared Package

The paper prototype is pretty much set to go, only need to make some new pieces for the map. It has no terrain difference, revised starting points for the units, a written set of both general and AI rules, and a quick reference for Player Units and Baddie Stats.

As per Dean's request, we've stripped the prototype down to its "skinnies," choosing only to implement HP, AP, and Attack into the individual unit stats.

Combat Test Infrastructure and Small Update to Cutscene Manager

Tim and I worked together yesterday making a simple C# project that will be used to do balance testing for our units. Currently, it's a very pared down test, only taking into account HP, AP, and Attack and not allowing for any movement. As our prototyping and game progress the tests will evolve in complexity as well.

Also earlier this week, I added small functionality to Cutsene Manager that allows for sprites to appear and disappear based on who's talking.

Refactoring and Other Stuff

Sam and I made some smaller changes to deal with some concerns. The grid has been altered so that units are in in squares, rather than on lines. Units now slide around the grid rather than appearing at their next spot. The biggest noticeable change is an "inspector" of sorts. When hovering the mouse over players and enemies, some information about them (name, health, ap, stats, etc.) appears on the screen. My big change for the week was a complete refactoring of the pathfinding and surrounding systems. I was planning on bringing attacking into its own script, but it needing information that only pathfinding held. I couldn't bring myself to have attacking mess with pathfinding so I moved some stuff around. There is now a class that holds information about the world. Sizes and, most importantly, the grid which holds the state of the world. I also rewrote the pathfinding to use the grid rather than waypoints. That required that I write a minimum binary heap and priority queue because C# doesn't have any. So, a lot of the back end has been rewritten or altered to use the new class of world information, and to use the grid rather than custom structures.

Friday (9/12/14): Tox Street (Day)

Last Friday, I finished the street view of The Tox in the daytime, which will be used in the game's cutscenes. So far, everything went pretty well. The next art I'm planning to do will be Vrell's Underground Research Compound.

Wednesday: Player Switching and Very Very Basic Friendly AI

Today Tim and I made it so the user could correctly switch between characters. We also got really basic AI working. We still need to make it so the AI move on seperate turns and not all together, but that is a problem for another day. We are going to continue work on AI next time and re-implement the AP system to limit how much players/AI can move per turn. Also we will have the AI actually attack which means we will have to put in some kind of health system.

Wednesday: First Core Hours

Tim, Sam and myself are currently doing some core hours today. Apparently none of us remembered to e-mail the exact time to the alias however since we planned it out in person. As a result, our artists have not received the memo and understandably not appeared. We've decided to try and meet quickly tomorrow to go over the schedule and make sure we're all on the same page for Friday's meeting with the advisors.

Cutscene Manager code has been merged with the main DarkHorse SVN finally.

Cooked up some possible formulas and stats for later down the road, but for the purposes of the paper prototype, many of those stats won't be represented. We want to get the idea of whether the pure basics of our game are fun. With that in mind I've designed a simple non-canon map to test out the basics of our design choices so far. I'm going to transfer the design onto grid paper tomorrow.

Tuesday: Cutscene Code Changes

I've come to my first impass in the cutscene code. I've come across two features that I want to add, but the code style to implement one feature won't work with the other feature. It's essentially come down to whether I want to allow for skipping cutscenes midway through them, or give the ability for us to create a nonlinear cutscene delivery system, allowing us to present cutscenes in any order we wish (essentially allowing for optional cutscenes). Both provided noticeable game enhancement for the user, so I will bring this issue up to the rest of the group and see how they feel on the matter.

Personally, I feel the optional cutscene feature's code style is a much better way to handle our cutscenes as it doesn't rely on "magic numbers" and instead uses an enum allowing for descriptive names for our scenes which will make it easier to follow the ordering of cutscenes in code.

Monday: Paper Prototype Progressing Pretty Promisingly

Got some ground work going for the Paper Prototype. We have a rough draft of our very first map design! Oh boy! Excitement. I'll be refining it a little more (and transferring it over to grid paper) and working on the pieces before we meet Wednesday for core hours to discuss and deliberate design (how about that alliteration?) and boil it down further into something halfway decent and playable.

Alongside the prototype, I'll probably look into some ways to code appearing, disappearing and static images being displayed into the Cutscene Manager, since at present time it's less of a Cutscene Manager and more of a text box manager. No promises on that happening immediately, but I'll definitely be looking into it.

Monday: We Have a Blog!

Dev Blog is up and running.

Today I've begun work on the paper prototype design for next advisor meeting and am helping determine specific assets to put on the schedule.

Also doing some minor retouching and editing with the story.

I'm currently planning to do the prototype map based on the second mission currently, since the first mission is merely meant as a tutorial to the basic fundamentals of playing the game.

Also, came up with a possible design idea for combat, some sort of line of communication concept that if broken, you lose command of a unit and it acts on its own based on some kind of AI (perhaps even tailored to personality if we're really ignoring scope). Interesting idea, not sure how viable it is though. I'll need to think it through more with the others and see what they think.