Teleporters and Treasure!

This was a really nice week for productivity for me : I was able to get in teleporters and lootable treasure containers in to the Rise of Dagon.

While the lootable treasure containers did take a bit of code work because of the slightly complex nature of handling 4 different characters inventory including being able to drag & drop on portraits, in to hands, into the inventory, and into the equipment area where your traditional 'paper doll' for all your armor and such that has very specific slot requirements - yes despite that mouthful - it was only about 3-4 hours of work to get it in as I was able to copy patterns I had in for the rest of the inventory.

Also I was able to optimize/refactor a little bit of inventory code to be better while I was in there so it was a double win!

The teleporter was  pretty easy --  it literally took more time to make the particle effects than the code!  Its really nice when features that you worry about ahead of time end up being much less painful to implement than you had feared!  (either that or I'm slowly getting better at this but I don't realize it?)

I still need to integrate teleporters in to the level editor but I should be able to get that done by the end of the weekend!

That's it for this update - see you next time!

Cemetery Gates Spell named

Special thanks to everyone who submitted names, there were actually quite a few really good ones ; Undertaker came up several times and was a very close call but in the end I went with Cemetery Gates for this Dark Affinity spell pictured in today's animated GIF

Special thanks to +Pedro Rocha for the spell name!

Also of note over the past two weeks I've been taking  the second past of UI polish and making the UI look less like Unity's default GUI and more like a fantasy RPG UI!

You can see it in the GIF above and also pictured here on the character creation screen:

New UI sprites/textures as shown on the character creation screen

I think it will definitely need more polish but it definitely comes off as more suitable to the game now that I've moved it away from unity's default!

Otherwise I've been working on polishing the core game in to a demo-able state. I have received two requests to demo the game one live, and one via twitch.  Once I have an idea what night the twitch broadcast is going to take place I will do an update via twitter  (follow me for notification: @CarlKidwell1 on Twitter ).

For the live demo it will be on August 18th at the Sacramento IGDA Meetup you'd have to sign up for the meetup to come but if your in the area and would like a preview your welcome to come!

Otherwise I've been doing some really focused refactoring/cleanup of my code as well. There are quite a few areas where things got really muddy during the design phase for player movement, and combat for the player and monsters -- also a bit in the inventory area.

I had tons of boiler plate code in some of those areas to handle if(player1), else if(player2) , else if (player3), else if (playe4) and then each brace would have 20+ lines of code for some complex inventory action.

I was able to take quite a few of those and parametize them so that only one statement is needed and it operates on a reference to the player that was passed .. greatly simplifying the code and making it easier to read and maintain - which I think was a really critical thing to do now. The project is getting pretty big and the more out of hand I let things get the more effort its going to be to maintain and make further changes to!