Frayed Knights Dev Diary: Getting Around In The World
Time for this week's installment of building a game in public. Please remember this is very much a work in progress, and absolutely nothing shown or described in these pages may have anything to do with the final game.

One of the first things I wanted to do with Frayed Knights was make it so you could actually - well, move around. I think that's important in most games, particularly RPGs. Although one of the many ideas I considered and dismissed was "Couch Potato - The RPG," which would not have had this requirement. I was actually pretty far along into the design document for this particular concept when I found myself losing entire weeks and gaining about fifteen pounds doing the research for the concept, and so I decided to put the kibosh on it.

But I digress.

Starting From An Old Classic
I started out trying to emulate Ultima Underworld's movement system. I remembered thinking it was really cool back in... when was it, 1992? It was a mouse-and-one-button movement system, where the position of the mouse dictated where and how fast you'd move and turn. I implemented it in Frayed Knights, tried it out --- and found out that it sucked. Not only did it suck, but it really interfered with the UI. The UI (or "HUD" - stolen from aircraft parlance for "Heads Up Display") in Frayed Knights is overlayed over the top of the 3D view, whereas in Ultima Underworld the 3D view was tucked away in its own private area.

You just can't steal something from one game and expect it to work perfectly in another game without understanding all the reasons WHY.

They Don't Make 'Em Like They Used To - Thank Goodness!
Well, that, and I went back to play some Ultima Underworld again in DOSBox to make sure I'd gotten it right, and discovered, much to my surprise, that my memories belonged in a bygone era where not every computer HAD a mouse, and it was this cool new pointing device that games didn't really know what to do with. Re-playing Ultima Underworld, I discovered that yes, indeed, the control system sucked back then too... we just were too ignorant to know this at the time.

So time to re-figure things out. Of course, the old cursor control / WASD standby was a possibility (and still is, possibly as a toggle - the game is still partly working in this mode). But as I'm trying to make Frayed Knights slightly more accessible to novice gamers who did not come out of the womb fragging their elders in FPS games. I still liked using the mouse directly to move about. So this is what I came up with.

When your mouse isn't hovering over something interactive, it's in one of four modes: Left turn, right turn, forward, and backwards. Near the left or right edges of the screen, the cursor goes into turn mode. You begin turning in this direction. The closer you are to the edge, the faster you turn.

Otherwise, the cursor is in "forward" mode - or, if near the bottom of the screen - in "backwards" mode. If you hit the left mouse button, you will move either forward or backwards.

If your mouse cursor moves over an interactive element (either a UI element, or an interactive in-game object like an NPC), it changes to an "action" cursor. When it is an action cursor, you will not turn, and clicking the left mouse button activates whatever's under the cursor.

Okay. So far so good. Except for one big ol' stinky problem.

Some of these buttons (including the character portraits / nameplates, which you click on to bring up the character window) are near the left or right edges of the screen. Which means you begin to turn when you click on them. And if you really want to turn, they can get in your way.

I haven't resolved this issue yet. One possibility that I'm likely to try is that you don't turn unless you click the mouse button. That feels like excessive clicking, but it is probably the best way to go. For those power-gamers (like me), I've left in keyboard commands to move forward, move backwards, and to move left and right (without turning) - the good ol' "strafe" keys.

Here's a side-by-side screenshot of clicking on the "journal" button to bring up the quest journal in-game (and yes, all of the main screen buttons are functional after my efforts this week - though the menus they bring up are not necessarily so):


Goals and Reporting
So... last week my goal was to get the skeletal system of the game up-and-running (with plenty of stubs). I mainly did this, though the conversation system and the combat system are conspicuously absent. You can wander about in the game, click on the characters (though their character screens are largely blank), click on the drama stars for a blank menu, bring up a map (again, stand-in), bring up a mid-game options menu (much of it fully functional, actually), and bring up the party inventory. Hotkeys also work from within the main game screen. Sounds cool, but there's really not much there, still.

So... this week? Combat systems and the dynamic conversation system. Prototyped, stubbed, whatever - which also means introducing some embryonic AI into the game.

I'll let you know how it went next week!


(Vaguely) related naval-gazing:
* Frayed Knights Dev Diary: The Scoping Saw
* Frayed Knights Dev Diary: Design Doc Fun!
* Frayed Knights Dev Diary: Background and High Concept
* Big World, Small Dungeon: Does Size Matter in RPGs?

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Labels: Frayed Knights, Game Design

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