Wooden Area Complete

I completed the exterior forest area in just over four hours. I will add the sound effects and encounters tomorrow. A battle will take place in this heavily wooded area. I am sure that it will be chaotic in the darkness and rain.

New Area, New Zone

Another day of development has passed on by. I started constructing a new area that will signify one of the last missions for this zone. I created the blueprint for a semi-playable non-player character. I won't give too much detail, but this character will follow the storyline into the next area and appear later on in the game. The current area will include an exterior grid involving a “game of cat and mouse” in the darkness and rain, followed by a lengthly multi-level interior. This interior will include the newest non-player and an uncommon boss. This boss will also reveal a little more of the storyline and deepen the plot. I have been taking it slow this week. I've been putting in an average of 35 hours a week so far, so I have spent a portion of my time just sitting here in my chair this week.

No Spawning, Only Jumping

I had a good couple of days with game design. I discovered something that doesn't seem to work the way it did in the old engine and I can't figure out why.

In the old engine, I wrote a simple script to spawn non-player mobs without difficulty. For some odd reason, this new engine recognizes the script, but fails to fire it. I was able to come at it from a different angle. By placing the defined mob in another location, I was able to get a script to “jump” them to set waypoint. In this case, I just made a room inaccessable to place all the area spawning mobs. As long as their AI is disabled until I fire the “jump” they ignore each other, even if they would normally be hostile to one another. I don't see this causing any future problems, yet I am curious why my older script fails. I remember that id Software's “Doom” did something similar with their spawning mobs.

I also need a better system of setting up proper camera angles. Right now, I have to “eyeball” them then check them out through a play-test. It's not the fastest system in the world. Perhaps I could give them a set facing towards a waypoint or a small floor mounted trigger.

I bought a new notepad, because I was tired of using sticky notes to document my local integers. I originally thought it was good idea to use sticky notes, until one floats away and I have to backtrack to remember what I set.

The story unfolds...

The first actual scene takes place where more of the player's past is revealed. Although a little bit is unfolded in the start of the game, this encounter actually uncovers the tie between the player and the storyline. In addition, something of the past of the player's first companion is also revealed. If the player had played the OC, they will not learn anything new. In the game setting, this will be the first time the actual character will learn something of this companion. The conversation ends in a battle, which during the play-test, I found to be a little too difficult. As I have done before, I will back down the attacker a notch. It's still too early to be killing the player.

Swamp complete. Ruins in process.

The swamp area has been done for a couple days now and I have been working on the interior of the ruins. The swamp looks good and it's complete with lighting and sound effects. The interior ruins has proven to be a little more challenging to my creative side. The player isn't gonna be powerful enough yet to survive a larger interior area, but I wanted to make this place seem large. Without adding meaningless twists and turns, I'm enclosing the walkable area with rubble and debris. It should give it a large appearance while still keeping the layout streamlined.

Depressing play-test and additional scripting

I had a depressing play-test the other night. I started from the very beginning of the game and starting working my way through. While doing this, I discovered several bugs I hadn't seen before. The most unnerving bug I found was that several of the animations assigned to various non-player characters were not running properly. The strange this is how fickle they were. Sometimes they ran; other times they did not. There seems to be no pattern to why or when they fail to run. I suppose I will have to check, re-check, then check it all over again.

On the bright side, I successfully implemented the first "mission". It is simple enough, but seems to run just fine. I have a second mission planned. This one will be much longer and more detailed. I had to consult with my technical director on a storyline aspect before I wanted to dig too deep into this second mission.

Normally, mission updates can be done through a single journal script. I tried using this when I was building the first mission, but found that it lacked the depth I needed to create some truly unique scripting. I decided to add a secondary floating variable to accompany all missions with the same tag-line. It will involve me adding additional scripting, but I think...correction...I KNOW it will benefit me in the end. It also means that I will need to be careful with mission scripting, as I will be relying on two scripts to fire properly rather than just a solitary one.

How much work did I just make for myself?

Good granny. I just completed the conversation and variable scripts for the "Artifact Recovery" mission. I am pretty damn certain that I made that overly complicated. I worked it out so if the player speaks to the same NPC at different stages of the mission, he will give a different response. That is how I wanted it, but I'm now worried on how long this is gonna take to test all this. It really sucks to not have a play testing team like the "big boys" have. I guess I have all week to test the eight pages of code that I wrote for this single task.

While everyone else in the country was out celebrating the New Years, I was writing code. How many other people would do that?