It's Been Awhile! - GDDs

Hello! It's been awhile since my last post. Sorry about that! So, I've been working on Valchion here and there (as well as other things, as always), and I really would like to finish it. Something I've found particularly useful is a Game Design Document.

What's a Game Design Document (or GDD)?

To me, a GDD is basically a plan for how a game is supposed to function, and how it works. Basically, you write out a GDD to explain what the gameplay's like, or what the plot revolves around, and what elements you plan to add and how to do so. Basically, GDD is a general document detailing the overall design of the game. Check out this Wikipedia link for more specific information on what a GDD is.

Why is a GDD helpful?

A GDD is helpful because it helps you out with two things.

1) It reminds you of what the game is supposed to be.

Without a GDD, it can be difficult to keep straight exactly what the original idea behind your game was. For example, without a GDD, you may not be able to remember how many zones there were supposed to be in the game, or what the general size and structure of the game was like. The other thing a GDD does is:

2) Keep you from adding things that don't line up with that original vision.

It's easy to get distracted while developing a longer-term title, and find that you stumbled upon yet another cool, new gameplay element, or an idea for another level that works better than the ones you have currently. The GDD helps you to stick to the ideas you have down already, rather than chase new features and content. Now, there's nothing wrong with finding a better way to implement a feature, or even to replace major sections of  the game based on ideas and the general feel of the gameplay. However, the GDD should reflect the current goal of the game. If you have ideas and "updates" that you want to apply to the game, then you should update the GDD accordingly, so that you don't get distracted, and can really focus on pre-determined aspects of the game.

The short of it is, I'm personally finding it a lot easier to work on Valchion when I have a GDD to guide me. With the document, I can get an idea of which zones lead to which other ones, and what pre-requisites there are to access zones (i.e. if you need a certain item). This helps to make the flow between areas easier to understand and build the game world around.

Apart from GDDs, I recently also purchased a cheap little art drawing tablet, so I've also worked on "leveling-up" my art skills. Anyway, thanks for reading!

By: Unknown On 12:50 AM

Continue Reading

10-16-13 - Valchion Update - GLSL Lighting

Hello! It's been awhile since my last post. I apologize for just disappearing, but life found a way, haha. I've been working on Valchion for the past few weeks, and before that, Sustain.


I'm going to try posting here more often, so that may mean smaller, more bite-sized posts to help me get through them. So, I've done quite a bit with Valchion so far.

I've started moving it over to GLSL (still in the Blender Game Engine) to give it better lighting and dynamic shadows. I thought it might be more efficient than having my own lighting system that needed to be rendered and updated every frame, but that may or may not be the case, as I'm seeing. :S

The lighting really does make the colors pop, though, which is good. I've also implemented a pixellation filter that makes the game look like it was rendered at a lower resolution and then upscaled. It can be triggered off and on in the options menu, which is nice.

I've also changed the bullets back to being just ray-casts, to give that quick and sharp-feeling action back to the game.

One thing that moving to GLSL mode did was make the loading take waaaay too long, so I've changed the way the game worked as far as maps. Previously, there were several maps in a scene (or zone, in a sense), and Blender would load up the scene, and then transfer you to an individual map.

Now, the maps are all hidden in an inactive scene, and the current map is loaded in. When you need to go to another map, it deletes the current map and loads in another. This process reduces the load time jumping between zones, since it's not loading maps that it doesn't use.

Anyway, it's nice, but as you can see in the screen above, the game's eating up my graphics card, which isn't great considering how little I actually have going on so far. I suppose it'll take some more diagnosing to figure out exactly where the issue lies with this.

Thanks for reading!

By: Unknown On 1:46 AM

Continue Reading

Hello Again!

Bullets are now physical objects;
They don't look like erasers like
this picture suggests, though.

Hello, yet again! It's been quite awhile since my last post - sorry about that. I've been really socking it away lately at my game project, which is great news. 


One thing that I've done is go back to Valchion and altered the combat - shooting used to be instant, but I've changed it to be slow, actually visible, dodge-able bullets. The instant ray-cast bullet method worked well, but the combat kind of suffered for it, since you could easily run into a problem with your aiming and easily take a lot of damage for it.

Now you can actually dodge the bullets (as long as they don't
move too fast), which might actually make the combat more fun overall. I feel like the guards might be too stupid, as they just follow you around shooting at you, but I'm not sure - maybe that's fine for 'beginner' guards.

I think I'm going to rework a small bit of the saving system. Before, I was saving basically everything in your inventory, including your weapons, which were Python objects. This meant that any time I loaded a save game, it would actually load the weapons you had at the time of the save into the inventory, regardless of what was in there previously. This means that even if I updated the weapons to have more ammo, or have a higher attack rating, loading the game would override these values. I'll just save the acquisition of the items in the game rather than their actual stats. I remember that I wanted to save the entire item in case I did something with it (i.e. you upgrade your weapons somehow), but I don't think I'll actually end up implementing that idea (for now, at least).

I've also worked on the dialog system a bit to allow for questions, as you can see to the right. I wanted to have more dialog in the game - to have more of a feeling like you're not alone, and of less isolation. Hopefully I'll end up using it well.

Here's a little technical write-up on how the dialog system has been improved:


At first, your average piece of dialogue looked like:

['Hello!', 'I am the second message!']

where it would step through the list index by index. It got more complex with dialogue options, and it was kinda awkward overall. Now I use a dictionary that allows me to do things like jump between conversation points by name, as well as do questions more easily. Here's an example.

{

':start': ['Hello!', 'I am the second message!', 'QYou understand?', ':Ido', ':Idont'],

':Ido': ['Good! I am glad you understand!'],

':Idont': ['Oh, that is too bad.'],

}

The ':start' key is where the dialog begins. It steps through the list and displays the text associated with that key until the end, a string that has "Q" at the beginning, or a string that has a ':' at the beginning.

A string with a "Q" at the beginning indicates a question. The NPC crops out the first "Q" when sending the text to be displayed, of course. The next strings are the labels to jump to if you respond with YES (the first option, one index further), or NO (the second option, two indices further).

Labels have a ":" at the beginning. You can jump to a label by using a string with the name of the label in the text. So, I can do things like repeat loops. For example, something like:

{
':start':["QWill you save our village?", ":SURE", ":NOPE"],
':SURE':['Hurray! Here's a sword!"],
':NOPE':['Oh, no, bro! Are you sure?', ':start'],
}

Should give a continuous loop if you reply with no. I can also change the script depending on the number of times you talk or interact with an NPC, which is nice, too. I might make a video about it soon, though I just outlined it pretty well, I think.



Also, I fixed the text to work better in a window, so that full-screen mode and window resizing should be nicer.

Anyway, I'm also working on another game project - one  reminiscent of the neon arena blaster, Geometry Wars. It's called Sustain (for now), and already feels pretty fun. It'll be an arena shooter like the aforementioned game, but with more twists on the original formula, like unique ships, weapons, and enemies. 

I think I'd like to encourage team-play with it, which is something that never really happened with Geometry Wars. Anyway, I'll write about it when I have something a bit more concrete to show (like a video).

Finally, I made a little video cartoon with the Blender Game Engine. I chose the BGE over Blender itself because I couldn't figure out a way to easily and simply do UV animation in Blender. I do this kind of animation (which can be seen on the character's face and eyes in the cartoon) in my games all of the time, so it was a nice fit for me. Anyway, watch it here!


Thanks a lot for reading and even watching. Have fun!

By: Unknown On 11:16 PM

Continue Reading

Valchion Devlog Update - 3-4-13

Hello! It's been a little while since my last blog post, but I've been working on Valchion slowly and steadily. It's starting to shape up. Here's a video showing my progress after the break.

By: Unknown On 1:23 AM

Continue Reading

Soldier Of / Valchion - Importance of a Name

Hey. So, I haven't been doing a HUGE amount of work on Soldier Of, but I'm slowly making progress on my main project here. I've also decided to change the name.

I've decided to change the name from Soldier Of to Valchion, as Soldier Of sounds generic, and doesn't really tell you what the game's about. You're not a soldier in the game, and you don't really war on the invading robots, but rather are just out to get to the center of the city to rescue your family. I think the new name helps to make the game unique.

I stopped development for a little bit (a couple of days) because of a game-crashing bug that occurred whenever I switched from the title screen scene to one of the game scenes, but I figured out what the issue was, fortunately. The bug's since been fixed, so development continues.

I remade the entire GUI with a Python module courtesy of Moguri from the BlenderArtists forums. The module's name is BGUI, and makes displaying GUI a lot easier and more precise. While it took a little while (a few days) I'm glad I re-made the GUI with it, for sure.

Most of what I've been doing is just trying to polish the gameplay, AI, graphics, etc. I'm not really adding new things, which can feel a bit discouraging, since the game's not getting any 'bigger'. However, the difference between the current state of the game and the last demo I've released should be pretty big, which is encouraging. Hopefully I'll get a new one out (that's cross-platform) in a matter of days.

Anyway, thanks for reading and watching my game Valchion develop!

By: Unknown On 11:30 AM

Continue Reading