What happened?
I basically hit a wall with Gaia in the fact that I totally ran out of inspiration and ideas for the game that would make it more interesting. while the game itself seemed liek an interestign concept, putting it into practice prooved too difficult for my immagination.
I've changed course now with a different project, but I'm still using the same terrain generation system i was working with for Gaia, hence I havent lost any time nor had to recode anything in the change-over.
So whats the new project?
I havent got a name for this new project just yet, but here's the idea:
You play a chracter in the woods, or desert, or even town for that matter, with baddies constantly spawning all around you. as you kill, your character developes in 3 ways:
1) evolves, more hp, stronger attack power, etc - possibly depending on the kind of enemies you kill.
2) gains upgrades - learns new spells, picks up items
3) can spawn better friendly units, for example a guy that runs around building towers, or a squad of skeleton archers to help you with the fight.
but at the same time, the enemies get harder and harder, and the fight goes on getting more intense until you eventually run out of lives.
I'm also considering adding 1v1 multiplayer to the game, but that will depend on how much time i have after i've finished everything else.
travelling around the map will lead you to portals to randomly placed bonus areas or different zones, ie city or desert, forest etc, each having its own unique type of NPC's.
So what have I done so far?
I've mostly been taking modelling tutorials since i'm a little rusty in that department, and looking into shaders, ready for creating media for the game.
By way of code, i spent a few hours putting together the fundamentals of the AI scripting, basically being baddies vs friendlies.
I've uploaded a
video demonstrating everything so far. if you have anything to say about the video quality, please do so and i will bare it in mind for next time.
Summary of updates (to save reading down):
18th Nov - Started on new idea, but still going to use terrain generation system used in last idea - Gaia
Started the new idea with a simple pathfinding and AI combat algorithm -
Video
19th Nov - Started upgradeding the pathfinding to handle multiple AI, bullets, trees etc. This was very time consuming and meant I had to learn to use dbp vectors. click
here for link to thread giving information about pathfinding. I may write a tutorial about this, but i stll need to write that tutorial about fractal terrains.
5th Dec - Released
demo demonstrating basic outline of the game. shows basic AI movement for both NPCs and "magic" bullets.
6th Dec - Fixed the timer issue, the system that removes used bullets form the game is still glitched though. generally took the day off codingwise.
9th Dec - Added sliding collision between player and trees, using
Sparky's Collision DLL.
--Latest Version--
Current Poll:
I'm currently restructuring the world generation system, and I'm wondering, how should the world work?
should it be confined to a specific area that neither the players or NPC can go out of? if so what happens when they do go out? does a collision detection stop them at all, or should an indestructable monster pop up and take the player out? maybe killing this monster will allow you to progress to the next level?
should the world be infinate, allowing the player to walk on forever?
or should the world be repeating/scrolling, making it seem as if the player's walking in circles or around a planet, meaning that running away from danger just brings you round to their back eventually?
update: new idea, stepping out of bounds simply creates a force suckign you back in.
update2: eoin's idea: the further out you go, the thicker the fog gets, and then you randomly re-emerge somewhere on the map., and the fog clears... or something.
current votes form IRC and MSN etc:
2 for scrolling repeating terrain
2 for the monster
1 for a mix of fog and scrolling terrain
1 for fog
