AltDevBlogADay

Just a very quick update to mention that I have signed onto altDevBlogADay.com

so future magelore blogs can hopefully be seen here to and more frequently.

I'm not really sure what I'll blog about,  but I expect Magelore will get a fair mention and any progress I make on Magelore will appear in a blog there for sure,  hopefully with lots of lovely videos of progress.

I'm undecided if I should continue to post here also. We'll see how things work out.

New Year Update

And so 2010 slips away.  The original plan to have magelore as a Xmas 2010 game has been buried for many months now. Trying to keep enough cash flow to keep afloat has been slowing down progress to a crawl. Seems I can't stay up to 2am every night of the week - not sure why I'm so tired lately. Gotta sort that out - I need those hours.

Happy New Year

To celebrate new year, I've been watching predator while making notes on magelore quests. Yes, I am a part animal - don't try to keep up with me,  I'd just wear you out.  Anyway, it appears that I will really need some dynamically generated dungeons to provide enough monsters to grind on. This is quite a deviation from plan - I'm not sure how much extra content I need to keep the dungeons interesting.  A few side quests like - go rescue little jimmy from the deep dark cave will add a lot of gameplay and grinding for not a lot of work. Ive never written a dynamic dungeon generator but the algorithms look pretty straight forward.  I should be able to just give a list of monsters and herbs that I want in the dungeon and some prize for reaching the bottom and how many levels there are. I'll need to jot down some more design notes - how to the players go up and down. What happens if you die in a dungeon. What happens if you exit and immediately re-enter - will it just be an exploit of infinite monsters to grind on?

The original plan was to just populate the world with monster areas and you can fight them on the mainland. I'll keep looking into making that work. Currently you go up to a monster spawner and just wait and kill them as they come out - not really good. Could randomise the spawns - so they never spawn in front of you. Just hang around an area for a while and you will find them, but never know where they are coming from. I guess I'll try this first. I think some dungeons would add a lot anyway, if I can chuck them in without too much effort.

Am I the most indecisive person in the world? I think I"ve changed my mind twice during the length of this blog. Oh well. Keep writing stuff down and implementing and testing. It's pretty obvious when something is working and when its not working. At the moment all I know for sure is that the spawning needs more work. Perhaps I've made the map layout too dense in an attempt to keep it from looking too sparse. Will need to experiment with that too.

I've got about 7 NPCs now. That's most of my family now and good friend from work and his wife. Need a few old wise men, and a couple more miscellaneous and that should be enough for the first release. 

I did some art revamping to the gui. Added some texturing to the inventory screen and the magic sidebar. Looks a truckload better. I think the health/mana status bar is a bit small,  and there needs to be a bit more fanfare when you get XP from monsters to give you a good feeling of achievement. I really wanna get some more content in first though - I got the tutorial mission in a couple of months ago and have made no progress on adding other missions. I'm fairly optimistic that once I get the next mission in place, it will build a lot of momentum.

Till later... party on dudes.

Much ado about nothing

It's been hectic hear but not in a good way. The company I have been with for 10+ years just folded, and I've been frantically looking for new work. I don't have the confidence to go full time on iPhone work since the last 3 wretched games apps only made a few grand each. I envy all the college aged developers - if there was something like the app-store around when I was living at home, doing university, it would have been glorious. Now we old farts with families need to do this as a very part-time hobby.

But I digress... so the company went down due to lots of staff with no paid projects sapping all the cash. I stayed with them with my team for another week hoping the current paying project could be salvaged but unfortunately the publishers didn't want to play ball with starting up a new company to finish the project so it was resume time for me. I quickly got a new job with another company in Brisbane but they got their funding cut and revoked a bunch of job offers a few days later so it was back to square one again.

Nearly a month later and I've now got a contract working on a war simulation project which should be a lot of fun and with an added bonus of being able to work from home. A substantial pay cut, but now that I'm contracting and working from home I should make back some of the money in savings from travel and taxation. I'm just registering my new business name now - Mad Muppet - which I hope to release Magelore under sometime early next year.

As for Magelore, while I've been mostly demotivated by the whole company-going-down affair, I have managed to get a small amount down. I've added a shop interface which uses the same universal inventory screen that everything else uses. Not the prettiest thing in the world but functional, flexible, consistent and done.

I've also done a small revamp to the hitpoints and play hud as seen in this shot..  In the top left you can see the player hud. Not sure if it is too small yet - will take some playtesting on the device. Should be trivial to enlarge if it necessary. The enemies now just show their hitpoints and level. The level is important since I use a WoW style adjustment feature to make sure it is very hard to kill enemies above your level, regardless of how you have specced and equipped. It will still be important for me to try and balance the game so an equal level monster is comparable in power,  but the level adjustment trick just covers my ass to make sure no-one can just breeze few the game after finding some exploit with the enchantments.

Now I've hit a point in the project that has bogged me down a bit - filling out the storyline and quests. I've decided to start setting myself numeric goals - like number of spells needed to release the game,  number of quests needed per level, etc.  Having defined numeric targets will give me a definitely marker to aim at, as well as a feeling of developmental pace. Firstly, there will be just 20 character levels in the game. I think that should be sufficient for a $1 iPhone game - I don't want the game to be too long that people don't complete it. I'd rather make a smaller $1 game and then release episodes or sequels. This is not because I am stingy - I actually think people would prefer to be able to finish the content and then going onto the next part at their leisure rather than get some 15hr epic that 90% of the public get tired of after a few hours. The trick should be to have nicely finished off storylines, but with some untied plotlines that can be expanded into sequels.

 So next on my list is to come up with 20 unique spells and up to 3 levels of each spell. I think that should be more than enough variety for a game of this scope. I know the top level spell will be some sort of vulnerability spell that will require quest-based ingredients to learn and will be needed to kill the final boss. Now I just need to fill in the content to cover from the end of the tutorial to the end boss :)

Ok, enough for now. Back to filling out my ABN forms.

p.s.  Just saw this brilliant line from John Carmac on iphone games.

"The Escalation programmers...codebase is all STL this, boost that, fill-up-the-property list, dispatch the event, and delegate that.
I had been harboring some suspicions that our big codebases might benefit from the application of some more of the various “modern” C++ design patterns, despite seeing other large game codebases suffer under them. I have since recanted that suspicion."

I've been harboring the same suspicions since I've been something of a dinosaur and completely avoided boost, and only recently embraced STL though the assembly bloat it generates still irks me. Nice to see someone like John Carmac back up my exact internal dialogue. Now I don't need to feel so guilty at not liking the overly complex template meta-programming that seems to be the norm now... Would love to see what his current large-project codebases look like.. Apparently he's still been using C till quite recently.

Back in the Helm

I've been really demotivated to work on Magelore lately, but I think the worst of it is past now. I had a bad cold and cough for about 3 weeks - painful. I still have remnants of the cough but the cold is gone.  Work has been very taxing - I'm working on an xbox/ps3 downloadable arcade title and the timeframe and code team is quite small. However, the workload is very creative and the game looks like it will be a really good title so I've been happy to put in lots of hours. Whenever I'm being creative at work, its takes from my drive to be creative in my home projects - I think I have a fixed per-day creativity budget.

I jumped onto Twitter today and have been tweeting with the creators of Rogue Touch and Sword of Fargoal on iPhone and its been a great motivator for me.  They're both doing very well - Rogue Touch is on sale and jumped into the top 25 list for RPGs which is awesome. So I'm back into MageLore again.  I've reworked the main menu now to be a simple 3 slot profile creation screen. You can delete a profile by dragging the delete icon from across the profile - I'm hoping this is enough to stop any accidental deletion. However, my 3 yr old has been happily deleting saved games from all my ipad apps and this technique wouldn't really stop him. I think its nicer than a "Do you want to delete Y/N" requester though.

I also pop up my own keyboard layer now. I spent a few hours playing with the UIKit keyboard overlay but it seems to be heavily biased towards automatically coming up when you use the appropriate UIKit control - which is not much use for me since all my UI is custom OpenGL code.

Anyway, feels like a proper game flow now - create a character, rename him, watch the intro video, and play, or select an existing profile and jump straight into the game.

I think things will move fast once I start adding some quests again. I've not nutted out my overall story yet. Maybe I should take some notes on the train to/from work - though I'm usually trying to catch up on sleep on my train rides...

Anyway, stuff is happening - so I just need to keep up motivation and stay in the saddle.

Tutorial mission done

The distance between blogs seems to be slowly creeping up. Be assured I'm still working hard on the game, but not a lot of visual candy to show off.  I've finished the tutorial mission in Magenta. It teaches the player how to fight, learn spells, gather herbs and do enchantments. It shows off some conversation choices and starts the main quest thread. I've decided going for a monkey-island comic style,  partially because its a very popular game that I've enjoyed myself,  and partially because my attempts at serious fantasy literature sucked badly.

On the technical front,  I've implemented the player load/save system now. I'm going to go with an auto-save whenever possible but avoid saving during conversations and specific points that might make it difficult to provide updates without breaking someones profile, like during spell casting or conversations.

Next on my list is to add Jesters (what would Ultima have been without all the pointless Jesters in the towns) and general mobile NPCs in the main cities,  and then I need the shops in finally so you've got something to spend your random drops on if they aren't needed for spell/enchantment recipes.

I just updated my iPhone4 to have GameCenter now and I'm very keen to start supporting it. At the very least, a health list of achievements would be easy to add.  I'd still like to add minigames to all the cities but I think this will have to come after initial release or I'll never get this thing on the shop. Christmas is already looking pretty doubtful unless I cut a lot of corners with the quest content and I don't want to risk bad reviews from releasing the game when its not ready...

I'm still working hard at my day job but we seem to have gotten the schedule under control now - at least as far as code goes, so hopefully I'll have more time for Magelore work now. I haven't added any new art in, but here's a shot of me fighting some caged rats in the tutorial mission.  A star now appears on the inventory icon whenever there are stat points to spend, or mission details have changed,  so the player should never get lost as to what to do next

First town map done

My first town map is finally done. Magenta. This is where you will start out in the world and where a short tutorial mission will take place.  I had to add a few new tiles to populate it but I think its got sufficient variety now. I'm slowly working through the tutorial mission now. The first missions take longer to write as I have to add new script support as I need it. I've added an OnCreate script so I can conditionally lock doors and unlock them later through conversations. It should be easy enough to conditionally unlock them also, say if you need a specific key or item. The tutorial missions locks you in a small room with the main female protagonist of the game - mina. She starts as your tutor but will turn up throughout the game at points in the storyline.  As you complete her tutorial quests, she unlocks doors for you and eventually you'll be free to roam the world looking for quests.

That's all for now. My day job is still eating into magelore hours.  The chances of releasing this thing by christmas are looking pretty slim unless content starts speeding up really quickly,  and I still don't have any shops which will  take a little while to get right.

Spring Update

Start of spring and everyone is sick.  Terrible stomach cramps and flew is sweeping my home and workplace. I got it a few days ago but not too severely and am just recovering now. On top of that, I've been crunching a few days a week on my daytime work,  which has been eating away my Magelore development time.

So I thought I better update that things are still moving but very slowly. I keep thinking I've finally done with tech and can concentrate on content and then something comes up.  Most recently, I've been filling out the world map. Its 256x256 which didn't seem like a lot, but hand painting 65000 tiles is taking longer than expected. I originally was using a "clever" trick to save on alpha overdraw, but it meant that I was restricted as to what trees I could put on what terrain. I've had to drop the trick so that I am now have a more conventional overlay/underlay terrain system. I've also added a mountain edging pass to my existing edging system. This means I can just paint any terrain and put any mountains or trees over the top and it will clean it up for me later.

Since there has been no new art released for a while I thought I'd drop out a couple of screen shots. Nothing too exciting, just shows some of the new muddy areas and the street lightings at night. I'll need to pull in some large landmarks that will help people identify exactly where in the world they are as the roads and trees can look a bit similar.