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.