Of Tutorials and RPG Elements
These past few weeks I’ve been hard at work attacking the game’s development from two angles, the Guided Tour as it were; and the foundational work for the combat, loot, skill, crafting and questing systems. So basically all the ingredients that go into any good RPG soup.
The first thing I’ve done is to create the Necromancer room. No more buying NPCs to test with off a debug menu (“sweet relief!”).
The tutorial basically gets the player to build a couple of rooms and place some minions. I got a nice little outline effect to work for this, it took a bit of convincing to highlight the right stuff (especially any blocking objects) but I got there in the end. Here’s a pic of the tutorial in action along with the Necromancer room, the highlighting and a guy I’ve decided to call Skullmo.
The eagle-eyed among you will also notice the room tilt and lighting changes. Oh and new doors! Bye-bye old weird blocky wooden things.
This was also a good opportunity to rework the dragging to make it feel a lot smoother. It’s better but it still needs tweaking.
Wiring in tutorials is actually a bit of a chore code-wise but it pales in comparison to getting in RPG mechanics. I know I said I wouldn’t spoil the combat side of things too much, so here’s a couple of screens of the work in progress.
There’s actually a ton of stuff that needs to happen in the backend for this to work elegantly and be scalable, so I’m pretty happy with the progress so far.
So that’s the basic combat mechanics in. Obvious next steps are some tasty vampire loot and equipment and for that; we’ll head back to Dracula’s Castle!
Thanks for following along to my developer diary, if you’d like to catch up on the progress you can read the first post here.
That’s it for this update, I’ll leave you with this scene transition I’ve been working on. Very much inspired by the excellent Batman: Arkham Asylum games, I’ll admit.
Catch you next time!