Rise of Dagon Development Update October 25, 2014

This week I  worked on some tasks that help bring things together in a bit of polish and some various steps towards getting the core game play one step further towards being implemented.

One of the polishing steps was to work on the way the player moves, including the smooth turning to the left and right which really enhances the feel of navigating through the dungeon as you move and looks really nice.

One of the steps moving closer to core game play is I have put in a test monster spawner that will spawn 3 skeletons in any level that I create in random empty spots in the dungeon.

The point of this is I want to test out their ability to move throughout the dungeon, and then test their ability to see the player if they are in 'line of sight' and then furthermore seek the player out (navigate to them) if they can indeed see them.


I also have been working for several weeks on attempting to create character portraits.  I have used  Art Rage 4, Adobe Photoshop, and finally I started using Mudbox and I think with Mudbox I am finally getting close to satisfactory results.

First I have a Dwarf who is looking pretty solid (but not finished of course). You'll notice he is missing any kind of clothes and armor but his face, beard, and color tones are all fairly decent. I would like a slightly more polished look in the end but this is a really nice effort at this point!

Next  I have also been working on an Elf who is not as far along as the Dwarf but this sort of shows how the carving phase looks before I start putting on hair and painting the model more. It's a little hard to tell because the dwarf has a beard but the elf has higher cheek bones, a more pointed chin, a thinner nose and of course the pointed ears are easy to spot!

 He does look a bit creepy with no hair but I will be working on that soon!

 With the continued use of Mudbox I have been getting better at it and have started to try and use it to take models from Silo 3D and start figuring out a workflow and pipeline for asset creation.  This Dungeon Door took me about two evenings of work to get to the state you see it in here.  I would definitely like it to have more detail but again its such a nice quality level as is that I'm really  happy to be able to hit this type of quality with the tools I have. It makes me feel really optimistic about the look and feel of the game that I will be able to create!

The changelist is a little light this week mainly because it was a split week between art and code.

Changelist:
- created a test method for spawning 3 enemies in random places in the currently loaded level
- refactored some movement code from MoveActor into PlayerMovement to fix some movement bugs
- found another bug in movement code that I wasn't aware of previously and fixed it (after moving in to a wall sometimes you could not move again)
- created new methods to apply SLERP to player turning LEFT/RIGHT
- created new monster interface class IMonsterMove to handle the AI for monster movement

And that's all for this week I hope you enjoyed reading, see you next week!

The Rise of Dagon: October 18 2014 update

I was able to hit a really huge milestone for the Rise of Dagon this past two weeks : Level Saving & Loading is in!

This was a big deal for more than one reason and there's a lot to talk about so I decided to do a 5 minute video to cover all the reasons and what happened the last two weeks for this update.

Thanks for watching, see you next week!

The Rise of Dagon : October 4th update.

So this week started off a bit rough, I was able to complete what I thought was going to be a week long goal the first night.

I know you are saying to yourself "how is that rough?!"

We'll that means I did a bad job estimating how difficult the task was for one thing.  Secondly it means that I hadn't thought out the next item fully and wasn't prepared for it yet. That item was in fact part of last weeks update.

So Saturday afternoon and Sunday ended up being a bit of a wash from the standpoint of getting my head back on track.  I took the opportunity to relax a bit and enjoy my weekend and played a bit of Terraria with my son which was a lot of fun.

And then Sunday afternoon I had my thoughts together and sat down to program and I kid you not - just as I did so I got an email from Netflix saying that the Walking Dead Season 4 was available!

Now this was just bad news. I really try to avoid getting wrapped up in entertainment when I'm trying to program but I love this show so I decided that I would try to do a 50/50 approach. I have been doing programming for half the night and art for half the night while I watch The Walking Dead.

This worked out okay though as I needed to get some work on concept art for character portraits done.

I have Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator but I have been hoping to use Art Rage 4 as I really appreciate its natural brush feel it has.  But I was really unsure of what I can actually achieve with it so this week was a experiment in that direction.

While I did do a small set of test portraits I won't be showing them off today as I think they all need more work before sharing.

So here's a quick video showing off the level editor work that I did this week:

Changelist:

- Created new Carve class to specifically handle level editing
- Refactored all carving items out of EditorInputHandler and placed them into the Carve class. This was a big job as there were over 1000 lines of code that had to be separated in to the two classes!
- created new methods in the Carver class to delete child objects when using the Edit Square inspector panel to remove elements (walls, pillars, etc)
- did some further optimization/refactor of methods in the Editor Input handler that could be simpler due to functionality moved to Carver class
- added new class CarveBrush which will be used to make customizable carve brushes
- refactored the Carve method in Carver to use logic according to which brush you have currently selected
- added new Custom 1, Custom 2, Custom 3 carve brushes to the UI
- added new "Apply" button in the brush inspector panel, this allows you to apply the pattern in the square editor inspector panel to the currently selected brush
- added UI for toggle between "Smart" carve and "Strict" carve
- added new logic for Strict carving in the Carver class Carve method
- added new logic for Smart carving in the Carver class Carve method
- adjusted material on solid blocks for the dungeon to be a flat black material; makes it easier to see the dungeon you are carving
- adjusted the lighting used in the editor to give a bit more atmosphere and shadow to the tiles

Thanks for reading, see you next week!