Frayed Knights Dev Diary: Orange
There are several people who are following the progress of Frayed Knights with interest - or so they tell me. I thought I'd let them chime in with some commentary on how things are progressing.

My goal this week was to finish the code to allow the "first five minutes" walkthrough to happen. Sadly, I'm not quite there. Taking a week to re-do the game mechanics took its toll, I guess. But here's what did happen.

Constructing the Dungeon
First of all, I needed to get rid of the first prototype dungeon, and replace it with... well, another prototype dungeon, but one closer in shape and form to the final version. This meant some good, quality time with Torque Constructor (version 1.02), a tool I'd not spent too much time with in the past. It was a learning experience.

After an hour, I was singing its praises. Constructor has some really nice, powerful features to work with. The knife, slice, and clip tools are especially awesome. The direct vertex manipulation is awesome, but it is also one of those tools that will let you shoot yourself in the foot. Repeatedly.

Three hours later, after my level had become so horribly corrupted and screwed up that I had no choice but to start over from scratch, I was ready to delete the program from my hard drive and salt the sectors on which it had once resided. Some of it was my own fault, but others were clearly bugs in the software. Things like faces of otherwise well-formed brushes not appearing in the exported file.

I nearly gave up after that. But, armed with better knowledge and some ideas of how to avoid certain pitfalls (or at least follow a careful procedure I could recover from disaster), I gave it another try. Three more hours in, and I was starting to get used ot it, and had learned to take certain procedures to avoid some of the more irritating idiosynchracies of the tool. I can't say I've mastered it in only seven hours or so, and I am still running into "gotchas" where collision suddenly fails to work and so forth. But I have a better handle on it, and I'm cautiously optimistic for the next release (1.03 actually released *TODAY* so I'm excited to try it out).

And now, I have the gameplay area for the first five minutes of the game roughed out. And I'm armed with greater skill!

Dirk: Ummm.... it's.... orange.

Benjamin: It's very orange.

Chloe: What kind of monsters paint their dungeon orange?

Benjamin: Very vile, dangerous beasts, I'm sure.

Chloe: Or very color-blind beasts.

Arianna: I'm sure it's only a temporary color. Jay said it's all prototype art.

Dirk: It had better be. I'm going to go blind in this dungeon.

Arianna: That probably won't be the only reason you go blind...

Dirk: What was that?

Chloe: Oh! He's going deaf, too!


The Fountain
I also had to create the fountain. Again, I'm focusing on stand-in geometry just to exercise the code. I spent probably fifteen minutes total on the visual. Much less time than I spent on the room that holds it --- but I've got a greater familiarity with Blender.

The code, on the other hand, was where I got stuck. I knew the scripting to handle interactive objects was going to be a bear. But as I started delving into it, I realized just what a task it was going to be. We're talking a mini-scripting language on its own... far more structured that TorqueScript, fortunately, but we're still talking conditionals and an elaborate set of results, from changes to the descriptive text to making a character sick. Before the end of the week, I was probably only about a third of the way there.

Arianna: It looks like...

Benjamin: ...a giant... uh.... half-buried...

Chloe: ...toilet!

Dirk: Exactly! Buried in orange!

Arianna: I don't care what the player chooses, there is NO WAY I'm going to drink anything from there. I'll just fake it.

Chloe: I'm getting sick just thinking about it.

Dirk: Please, please, please tell me that it's going to change form before this game is released! I can't dive into that! You aren't paying me enough!


Additional Changes
Besides this, I got the ability to cast spells on your own party working, and so now you can heal party members.

Dirk: Hear that, Ben? You aren't useless anymore.

Benjamin: True. And I was worried that toilet-boy was going to hog all the glory.

I fixed some more legacy issues with the combat system --- it was still calling for skill adjustments which naturally no longer exist. There was just a lot to clean up from the old system and replace it with new, improved game mechanics. And I implemented version 2.0 of the movement system. The right mouse button now causes your party to move and turn according to the position of the cursor in the window. It will undoubtably require some more tweaking before its done, but it seems to work okay.

Chloe: Yay! Now we can get lost twice as easily!

Benjamin: In orange-ness!

Plans For This Week
This week, I'm going to continue to work on interactive objects, and get the toilet... er, I mean fountain... fully functional.

Arianna: That's it. I quit.

Dirk: Hey, wait for me! I wonder if those Fallout 3 guys need an extra NPC. I could do post-apocalypse, I think.


(Vaguely) related silliness:
* Frayed Knights: Emergency Redesign
* Frayed Knights: First Five Minutes Walkthrough
* Designing a Computer RPG Rule System
* Making a Rogue-Friendly RPG, Part I

All The Cool Kids Are Talking About This On The Forum!

Labels: Frayed Knights, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 10:58 PM (Permalink)