Between starting a new position and working to integrate some 3rd party plug-ins, I have been busy at work trying to get the boring things out of the way. My only excuse for lack of screenshots is that I am still working on art resources. Other than that, I have found some 3rd party pieces that plug in quite nicely and others that are more trouble than they are worth. You always want to believe that a 3rd party plug-in will save hours, but if it doesn’t come with good comments or instructions on integration, the truth is that it may add many more hours of frustrating trial and error. I can’t count the number of times I am happy to be using source control so that I can blast everything back to the last known good check-in. Once I can get some art resources in place, I will get some screenshots up so this doesn’t seem so bare.
Less time, but progress!
Back to the working world for a bit*… Less time for focusing on game dev, but the framework for the arena is progressing very nicely. I am hoping to have an early and rough list of features posted over the next couple of weeks as I continue hashing out functionality.
In the meantime, enjoy this anti-grav exploding box 😉 https://youtu.be/Em_1uTqLfUE
*unless someone wants to pay me to sit around for the rest of the summer ^_^
New project announcement (about time, right?)
After putting the MUD rewrite on hold, I decided to pursue a different project I had tossed around previously. I am going to use the data I extracted from all of the MUD data to build out an arena-style game. Rather than build out an entire MUD, I will build out a small subset like the classes, some weapons, some spells, some skills, some mobs, etc.
I draw a lot of inspiration from really old arena games from the BBS days and more current ones such as Hero Siege and the countless other tower defense games out right now. However, I opted to focus more on the player as the central target rather than a tower defense scenario. I remember back in the day I played an arena game where you started with basically nothing and were forced to fight to gain money to buy weapons and equipment if you wanted to survive. This was all ascii graphics, so not exactly glamorous. But the concept was fun… face increasingly difficult enemies in an arena. In my interpretation, the player doesn’t get to just face one enemy at a time, but multiple enemies vying for his/her death in a closed battle location. I can have fun with this… so this is what I am making.
Didn’t quite hit my deadline
So I imposed my own deadline to finish parsing by the end of April and I didn’t quite hit it, but I improved the parsing speed and efficiency a significant amount. The remaining files will be trivial now. I have to work hard to keep myself out of the refactoring loop 😉
The next steps for the data will involve 3rd parties so I can go back to focusing on logic, and I can get back into feeling like I am actually creating something.
Catching up
I have been caught up between regular work, school, getting over being sick, and the family over the past several weeks. I haven’t had much time to post progress or do anything highly amusing. My apologies for both.
I have continued to work on parsing out data from flat files, and gave myself a deadline of the end of this month to complete all major items there. I even communicated the self-imposed deadline to my team, so now I have to follow through!
Next steps are to document all (or at least most) high level game logic and develop a path forward. After that, it’s down to actually moving forward and hope that version control is refined enough to allow us to stay away from problems that have plagued me in UE4 up until now.
Alsherok project cleared
I have received sign-off from all major copyright holders to interpret and include any of their content in a 3-D re-envisioning of the Alsherok world. There is still a lot of prep work to do the old world any sort of justice, but at least it means that I can spend some time on this project knowing that my biggest first hurdle is cleared.
Recent Comments