The Rise of Dagon : Week of Sept 13 2014

This week was largely focused on the very first passes of the level editor for the game. However I did create one new piece of art which is the ever present dungeon wall "with shelf" to place and retrieve those all important quest items upon!

As you can see in the above shot the shelf is on the right hand side, a little hard to see in the lighting but I do prefer dark/ominous lighting for dungeon crawls as it really adds atmosphere!  Certainly as a player you will have different forms of lighting that you can adjust that with such as torches or light spells but this is roughly how it would look with only the wall torch nearby.

So I'm going to forgo the changelist this week because much of the changes were not code related but instead exploratory UI building tasks.

I am still very much trying to find all the right elements and a simple elegant style to editing the levels.

I would like to have some power in editing, yet an over arching simplicity.  The screenshot below show's off the state of the editor UI today.

In the bottom right hand corner will eventually be a preview window rendering the players perspective from the selected square but its just a black square at the moment.

I'm sure that I'm not satisfied yet. I sort of added things I needed to get the first pass of things going such as the slider bars that show the X, Y and Z of the level.  If we set those values to something like 10/10/3 we would get a level that looks something like the one shown in the shot below.

Then you would begin carving out hallways in each level depending on the layout you wanted.

You may notice if you look closely a small transparent layer above the red level blocks -- that is actually a transparent UI layer to help select the grid member you are working with rather than part of the level.

My current idea after a week of exploratory design is I want the flow to be something like this:

• Choose your levels size
• Select the layer you would to begin editing
• Carve out your halls ways and rooms with a carve tool
• Place major items like doors, arches, pillars, connecting walls, stair ways etc
• Place Monsters (potentially with some path editor for patrols)
• Place decorative items like cobwebs, debris, skeletons etc.

What you don't see in that list is where / how you would add things like quest items, monsters, loot, and game logic like "this door requires the gold key with id 437"

I'm picturing while editing and placing items that they would have meta data style properties to add these things in. But I would also really like the editor to be super smart and have a warning list that tells you "hey you put in a door that requires key 437, but you have not placed a key 437 in the game yet!"

There's really a ton of work left both in the interface of the level editor itself as well as the logic it needs to help you build a level!  I expect to be working on this for the next several weeks!

Thanks for reading!