Progress

 Just a small progress update on my new #1GAM game.

I have added most of the essentials from the previous post. The only one not done is that some units target the mothership and not enemy fighters, but this should not be that hard to do.

From the nice to have features I made a start with the Allied ships and while they are working they suffer from the same limitations the enemies have so hopefully I have some time to improve the AI.

Change of plans

I have decided to postpone my original January game to April for now. Mainly because it turned out I had less time left to spend on the game then I hoped and the random nature of the game made it hard to create a smaller version. So instead of delivering a half working prototype I moved that game to April which gives me more time to finish it to my satisfaction.

Space shooter

To not immediately fail the 1GAM challenge I started working on a smaller game for January. The January game is now a sort of space shooter where waves of enemies try to attack your mother ship and you have to defend it. For now I have the basic controls working and a very simple AI. This weekend I will hope to finish  the basics of the game which means adding the following.

Essential:

1. Add mother ship
2. Let some enemies (bombers) go after the mothership and ignore the player
3. Win and gameover conditions
4. Waves of enemies

Nice to have:

1. Smarter enemy Ai
2. Allied ships
3. Improved graphics
4. Mothership, Ally and player ship upgrades
5. Switch to allies ship on player death
6. Point system
7. Different levels

Alpha online

Hoorah, I made my deadline to have the first playable version online by Sunday! It is a really rough version, but you can win and lose so I guess you can already call it a game.

This week I will start expanding the options the player has.
I have been thinking about adding some of the following options:
- Maybe add some ability/skill tree and level up system.
- Items and shops
- Extra options for the encounters (healing, temporary bonus, map information)
- Towns as special locations where you can access shops/tavern etc.

Furthermore it is impossible for the player to form any kind of strategy at the moment. I think the main cause is that the player does not get any information about what to expect for the encounters. I will probably add some graphics to show different kind of regions and make the encounters appropriate for that region.

Progress update January game

I am currently working on the basic game-play  The player will control a party of heroes and visit different locations with different encounters. The encounters are a bit similar to FTL where you get a small piece of text and then some options. I would like to actually create chains of these encounters, but that will probably prove to much work to complete this month.

For the combat part I will probably keep it completely automatic for now as I plan to spend February on the actual combat.

I hope to have a basic playable version this Sunday, after that I will start adding some polish like graphics, sound a main menu etc. and add some more content like encounters, enemies and allies.

Adding random names

After playing around with creating a random name generator for cities and towns I have ended up with the following result, you can also see some temporary UI.

Adding locations and links

The current world contains a texture with the world map and a set of regions in the land area of the world. The regions know which ones are their neighbours.
As a next step I have added one location per region somewhere randomly in the region and added a link between each location in neigbouring regions.
The small blue capsule represents the player's party for now.

You can see the results in the images. Some outstanding issues with current system:

1. Selecting a random pixel from a region make the location often close to the edges of the regions.
2. Probably a bit to much links between the locations
3. The links are drawn using the LineRenderer in Unity, but this needs a draw call for each one of them.

Region generator fixed

Having fixed the bug I talked about in my previous past the regions look like this. This is the regions I get from the Voronoi generator in the Coherent Noise Library.

Then I walk over this image and identify the regions and store the neighbor for each region. The following image has the identified regions where there grey-scale is based on their idea, which results on the earlier discovered regions to be darker than the later discovered ones.

Region generator bug

To generate the world I have decided to use the Coherent Noise Library for Unity. To create the landmass I create an height map. This is done by using billow noise and combine it with a circle to force it to be an island. By giving the 'different heights' a different color it presents an decent map like image:

After creating the terrain texture I want to divide the land into different regions. These can later be used to determine where location should be placed. I imagine it might be useful to give regions some properties, like evilness or how forresty it is, and blend the different regions so there is nice transitions between the different regions. These properties can then be used to determine what kind of location should be placed in these regions.

By using Coherent Noise's voronoi generator I got a nice set of regions on the world map, but the filter to remove regions from the sea area's is still buggy.

January's game

The idea for my January game is to have a randomly generated fantasy world, give the player a party of heroes and let him walk around fighting monsters and everything else heroes typically do. For January I will only focus on the world overview part of this so:

• Create the map
• Populate it with cities/towns/dungeons etc.
• Create roads between these locations
• Let the player walk between the locations

Hello World

Welcome to my blog which will be mainly dedicated to my progress on the One game a month challenge.