First off: What happened to State of the Game III? I didn’t feel like writing it and now I don’t feel my ability system is good enough to be showcased yet. So maybe later.
Since the game is about raiding in an MMORPG world I thought I might call my Sprint Reviews “ID Resets”.
My first 2 weeks of development are over! It was great fun! I still have my regular work and university stuff, so I spent most of my free time on this project which means a couple of hours most evenings. Some more thoughts and feelings at the end - review first. I put everything in my Trello Board. The 2 left columns are just idea-pools for Bosses / Abilities. The 3rd column is stuff that I might want to do some day. The 4th column is my actual backlog that I’m working on. “In Progress” and “Done” are self explanatory I think:
I used the colored labels to mark different types of tickets - “Feature”, “Bugfix”, “Content” and some others.
So let’s just go through some of them.
Spell Indicators are the little circles (or other shapes) that show you where a spell is going to land before you cast it. I already had a working indicators system, but I used the actual spell-prefabs as indicators which isn’t great, since there’s no visual distinction between a spell you’re about to cast and a spell that’s already in effekt. So I got this asset from the Unity Store. I initially wanted to only use their art but after a few modifications also decided to use their code. Here’s the system in action: First a teleport spell with a dark range and spell indicator. Then a spell that casts 2 portals:
Units move the the clicked location but stop and attack enemies when they are in range. In the video you can see the small circle where the units walk to is either green (move) or red (attack move). I might change the color of the entire line later as well.
Note: In the video the HP bar for the big cylinder is bugged - I changed the way the HP bars are rendered and haven’t moved this guy to the new system yet.
When you hover over an ability icon you now get a tooltip:
I wrote a little bit of templating code to make sure the values in the tooltips are always up to date. Put the name of the property into {{curly brackets}} and the proper value will be inserted.
I also spent an entire afternoon of frustration on the custom drawer for the targeting section - I might do a post about this at some point since since I didn’t find any solutions online about this (it’s a pretty specific set of requirements).
Press a key and the unit stops. Not going to record a video for that one.
This one was pretty simple due to my Action based melee system which allows me to swap the attack function during runtime. The barbarian spins with every hit and damages all enemies within range.
The unit vanishes, heals and becomes untargetable for a few seconds. Used smoke effect from the cartoon FX pack I bought. I eventually want the character to become a bit transparent for the duration of the effect.
Added ranger and the knight. It was mainly busy work importing the models since the heroes have no abilities or anything. Anyways, here’s two possible outfits for them:
Units now turn towards their melee target, the animations align better with the moment of the damage and the rogue does more damage when attacking from behind (or the side).
I didn’t have much time to work on the project and most of the things that made this list were easy to implement. I lost a lot of time on other things that aren’t important / noticeable enough to make it to this post. I guess the 20/80 rule applies: 80% of the results are achieved with only 20% of the work. I need to check my priorities better to make sure I focus on the important things. I’ve also noticed how hard game design is. Growing up playing games I always thought getting things to work is the hard part. But now the hard part is figuring out what makes for a fun experience. What abilities should the heroes have? What mechanics should the boss have?
I’ve also realized I’d love to work in a well oiled gaming studio. Working as a software engineer is such a nice job when all of the other stuff (acquiring customers, requirements gathering, graphical design, …) is done by other experts. Working with artists and other game designer would probably make coding way more fun. But for now I’m fine with being a one man show. It’s limiting to only be able to use the assets the unity store has to offer but I’m not going to spend my time learning 3d modeling… for now.
