as I launch into the final phase of preparation for my novel - I’m about to write the final draft of the outline, eek!! - I want to start ramping up my promotion of my baby! A God Grown Old is going to be AWESOME… and this is your chance to be a part of it. a real part of it.
so yes, this is a
World Building
In the aftermath of the demo release, I’ve been taking a substantial break away from coding and focusing more on design. There is plenty of work left to be done on the engine but I really wanted to have the overall game design more nailed down before continuing to dive face first into the rest of development.
Of course this meant completely hashing out the rest of the game’s story which, in turn, involved creating a world to fit that story into. So I figured I’d take some time to talk about techniques and difficulties that went along with building an RPG plot and creating a whole new world for it to happen in.
I have to say I’m pretty much on cloud 9 at this particular moment.
Nick over at MobileGameBuzz wrote a very nice review about our demo citing the only problem being the fact that it was a demo. It’s feedback like this that absolutely makes all the pain and stress of development 100% worth it.
Note: The Download link in the middle of the page is an advertisement, make sure to scroll down for a link to the market page!
BladeQuest Demo Post Mortem
Well this blag’s been pretty quiet lately. To be honest, I set myself a goal of publishing a demo to BladeQuest by the beginning of August and until that was done, I couldn’t justify taking a break long enough to publish updates. But now it’s out there (albeit a few days late) so let’s talk about that.
Most of the day is being devoted to Bladecraft, the world editor for the game. I’ve previewed in earlier posts the tile placement aspect but now my current task is being able to create game objects in the map files.
Game Objects are far more complex than tiles, they have their own sprites, animations, states, and lists of actions to perform when the main party activates them. This image shows the first draft of the Object Creation window. There’s all sorts of fun options on board but this is only the visual front-end. Hooking this up into data and then into a file is going to take an extreme amount of time.
I basically have to recreate my gameobject class structure in the S# application. This is the simplest way to organize it and have the two systems marry together nicely but there’s going to be A LOT of simply rewriting dozens upon dozens of 1-2 line get/set functions. :(
Some of you may recognize the layout. I’ve taken quite a bit of design inspiration from the RPG Maker Series specifically RTP 2003. Most people steal those game resources like sprites and sound for their games so i figured it wouldn’t hurt to steal some good design ideas for my own version of it :)
For those who haven’t heard (including me prior to today) the folks over at FlexyCore are working on a port for the Android Dalvik virtual machine that will run on iOS. This is extremely exciting stuff because porting and Android title to the iPhone currently means quite literally rewriting the entire application in Object C with the iPhone API’s.
If this works out it will provide seamless and fast porting from Android to iPhone in a legal, non-jail broken way. ^^
BladeQuest now on Facebook
I’ve decided to have a first demo release within a month and so I’ve started this fan-page. You should like it!
A Peek into the Processes of a Disorganized Developer
I made mention in previous posts that I’m the only coder on this project and that can really cause some issues because I never feel pressured into using good coding practices. Basically, if I can remember what i did somewhere or how I did it I’m fine but if I forget or if someone else wanted to contribute, we’d all be in a world of hurt. So remember kids, comment your code and just because you can doesn;t mean you should.
So I figured that if anyone out there is actually interested in following development, I should probably show that we do in fact have something show-able done. The playable demo is ever expanding with new features as development continues and so here are a few screens from the current version highlighting some of the graphics in the game.
Be warned that no names or text used are necessarily canon at this point. Except for Aramis, yeah that’s his name it’s awesome.
Super kudos go to TehCappy who is our resident artistic genius providing us with all this great art!
Tilemapping on Android with a Canvas
Ok, time for another coding post. All this non-BladeQuest-related average blog shit aint cutting it. Also, my design post was pretty thrown together and unenlightening in my eyes and most of the system I developed with it turned out to be crap in real practice so it’s back to the drawing board on that one.
The Math of an RPG
I’ve been away from work on BladeQuest for a few weeks. I don’t have any particularly good excuses. I did want to create a demo video to give people an idea of what it’s looking like but as it turns out the small laptop I use for development doesn’t play nicely with the AVD Emulator (let alone Fraps). So nonetheless I’m just going to try to get back into it starting with a post about a topic that has caused me much headache since reaching it in development.
That would be the Maths.
How’s that revenge argument holding up now?
As of Sept, 11, 2010
Source; http://www.prosebeforehos.com/government_employee/09/11/perspective-on-911-and-the-invasions-of-iraq-afghanistan/
