Two classes done!
The Wizard’s a no-nonsense ranged spellcaster with a great Intellect stat who’s made out of tissue paper. He starts with Fireball, a ranged damage spell, and a neat little crowd control skill called Teleport Away:
If things get too hot – fwoof! – the problem enemy’s gone. Course, he still has to deal with them later.
As you level up the Wizard there are a few different paths to go down – and they’re less clear cut than the Fighter’s.
It’s theory time again! Inspired by a TIGSource forum post, I’ve been thinking about the question: how do you make your game’s controls fun?
See, not every game needs tight, fun controls. Sometimes they can be destructive to the experience you’re creating. Sometimes you’re after deeper gameplay which conflicts with the simplicity and immediacy of great controls.
But most of the time, we want pressing buttons to feel awesome – and there’s a good few ways I can think of to achieve that 🙂
Starting with the basics:
The Fighter’s the first class to get a full set of talents. Complete with programmer art. Lucky fellow!
Now he’s got a whole bunch of skills which let him take damage better, and he’s got a choice between Charge – which is great for hunting down ranged enemies and pulling off sneak attacks – or Intimidate, which is better at handling tough enemies and packs.
As you level up a Fighter you now have a major choice between two new skills: Charge, which allows you to dash across and hit an enemy from several squares away, and Intimidate, which weakens and occasionally scares enemies near you.
The art’s still very much placeholder, but I’ve been expanding the systems to handle more interesting level features.
Like furniture in a house in the starting village, or a scarecrow in the field.
A camp on the edge of a clearing in the forest.
An archery range to one side of a fortified hostile town.
A bare storage room within the keep.
I now have just five “must fix” tasks left before I’ll be happy to really start showing the game to people, I think!
Here’s a challenge for you: name three current-generation console games with a key female protagonist where you can’t see her cleavage at any point.
Take a few minutes and see what you come up with. I threw this at Twitter yesterday and the answers I got back are down below our classic Strong Female Character contorting wildly so you can see her arse and her tits in a single shot, so y’know – try it yourself before you get to the spoilers.
“My spine!” yells Lara as she hits the floor. Sorry Lara; you’ll be in hospital for the next few weeks.
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Development’s been a bit heavy lately. The first major milestone’s coming up soon and I’ve been hammering away on some big, nasty tasks to try and get that done. The latest was porting the save system across from CQ1. Now, save systems that can save the game anywhere (not just at checkpoints) need to dig into just about everything in the game, so implementing one means methodically going over just about every gameplay feature and bit of game state in fine detail to make sure nothing’s been missed.
It was a right pain! That was about two days’ work, filling out multiple notepad pages to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Now it’s done, but I’ve got another dozen or so tasks around that size to get done for the milestone. I’m starting to wish I’d set up a simpler milestone before this one 🙂
Anyway, what with focusing so much on development, I haven’t had as much time for this blog as I’d like. Fortunately there’s material popping up about CQ2 elsewhere! Gerrard Winter did a cool double feature on CQ2 for Indie Games Mag covering where it’s at and where it’s headed. Check it out.
Cardinal Quest 1 is out now on iOS and Android. 😀
Since the last post I went to the International Roguelike Development Conference 2012, picked up some cool ideas, demoed the game to various people… and fell horribly ill with some sort of bug, which knocked me out for the rest of the week. I’ve still got the traces of it – I’ve got a nasty cough and my throat’s all messed up. I’ve been working on my Solid Snake impression.
So I’m back at work now and trying to figure out what the hell an end-of-chapter boss should look like in a turn-based roguelike. o_o
The past few days have been a holiday of sorts from CQ2 development. Ido came over for IRDC and has been hanging out with me here in the office. We’ve been working on Cardinal Quest 1 instead! We’ve been getting version 1.3, the save game update, ready… that and playing around with Joshua’s Android build, which is neat as heck.
It’s adorable! It works really well on a tablet; surprisingly so.
Today’s job was a different mission. Moving furniture, switching on as many lights as possible and setting up a little film studio in the living room:
…all in the service of something quite neat we’ll be doing soon, even if – by this point – it’s a bit predictable. 😀
It’s still a mockup at this stage, but here’s the screen that’s going to replace those little buttons in the top-right corner of the menu. It’ll also give us volume sliders.
This transparent overlay will be shown over the main menu and over the game, whenever you go to the options screen. I’ve gone for a simple style that deliberately doesn’t mesh with the gameplay graphics, to clarify that it’s a non-gameplay menu… but I’d still like something more elaborate. I really need to find a UI artist to overhaul this game soon. 😀
The other change lately is a subtle reorganisation of the skill/item bar:
Skills now have their corresponding hotkeys underneath. Items have been moved to be aligned above skill slots and are now used by pressing SHIFT+1 through SHIFT+5 instead of 6 through 0. I’m hoping this’ll prove a bit more natural.
The task list’s gradually getting shorter. 😀
New main menu!
It’s a good deal cleaner and shinier. The background’s subtly animated; I’ve spent the best part of today adding in a handful of effects that make this screen nicer.
The rest of the day went on proper widescreen support. CQ2 now adapts to your monitor’s aspect ratio in full-screen, supporting up to 16:9. The only part of the game that now doesn’t handle widescreen properly… is the new menu 🙂
I’ll be patching that up tomorrow, revising the new assets for the 854×480 widescreen resolution. Then it’s on with a minor GUI overhaul: I’ll be adding a “Rest” button and putting numbers by all the hotkeyed skills/items.
And eventually my velocity will stabilise in FogBugz and I’ll have a decent idea when this game might be done. o__o