Third Party Goodies

There is a part of us all that wants to do everything from A to Z, write our name on the cover and marvel at our success. In years past this has turned into me working on a feature for weeks and not getting it to half the quality of a 30$ asset on the open market. More recently I've learned that there is a time and a place for doing everything meticulously by hand, and that time is not now.

There is however often some very nice middle ground.

I recently picked up a new weather package to help improve my clouds, sky, and weather, but am not using it as advertised. I already had a weather system that I liked very much, and so have merged the two into a glorious companionship.

I'm using my own cloud maps with more layers than are supported out of the box, spreading the different layers into different short range and long range rendering schemes, some overlapping terrain with others not. I have taken full control of each cloud layers coverage individually, the different layers of rain and their animation sheets, multiple layers of fog, atmospheric scattering colors, and more. It would have taken me months to write all of the helper functions and shaders that I'm using just for the weather.

My budget and free time are non-existent, so it's not easy to pick something and go with, but it certainly beats trying to do everything by hand. Many of the assets available to indie developers such as myself are built by passionate indie developers that spend months or even years perfecting their products... just like me! It's just a different target customer base.

I'm currently hard at work on a promotional video as I finish the last bits of company registration fuss with some help from my family. With Steam's Greenlight getting the axe... I'm not sure how that will all play out, but Kickstarter is getting closer and closer. Stay tuned!

Law and Armor

We now have an official legal body to call our studio! Introducing: Big Kitty Games LLC. It's a pretty simple website for now, but the reality of creating and managing a legal body is a little less simple.  I'm still in the middle of setting up a business account (tough living overseas), and a couple more things to file, but the ball is most definitely rolling.

As a legal body there are now a new set laws I have to be careful of with pretty much everything. For example when I buy an asset on Unity's Asset Store am I paying with company money as a company expense? Right now we're still a one man show with zero income, so I don't have to worry about too much yet, but salary, spending, taxes, and more can all end up costing you unforeseen money if handled improperly.

Despite all of that eating up a lot of my time, it's been a very fruitful month in terms of actual game development. I've added some global settings so that players can turn up and down the quality of the game world. I've also incorporated a simple day and night cycle, am working on some weather improvements.

The biggest change of late is by far my new avatar system. At long last I've got armor pieces swapping individually per slot. Cloth gloves, leather shirt, metal leggings, totally possible, and absolutely necessary for a proper RPG. This system also allows extensive avatar modifications and though not yet fully implemented, I hope to add tons of player customization the point of trolls, ogres, elves, human, blue skin, pink hair, and more. I really believe that players should be allowed to experiment as much as they want, and be given ways to correct things when they conclude that pink hair on their Paladin was a mistake.

I've also got spell and ability effects in and working well, though I still need a lot more.

The game story has also developed quite a bit from the quite random "You exist! Have fun" sort of introduction I had up until now. It's going to require some new artwork so I won't be updating the website just yet, but it really blends nicely into letting players be whoever they want to be!

Runtime marketing, er generation

I've spent a fair amount of time over the past few weeks upgrading the real-time (runtime) terrain generation. For starters I switched from using multiples of 10 to using powers of 2. This has solved more than a couple issues I was having because a lot of the base code in Unity and some of the plugins I am using are built to only work with powers of 2. So instead of 1000 meter terrains we now have 1024 meter terrains, but ultimately the end user isn't bothered as a meter is still a meter.

I also doubled the long distance quality which makes for a longer initial load, but it looks a lot better and doesn't affect performance that much.

The way that the runtime generation is setup allows players to easily specify the long distance draw distance from 16km up to 64km, which runs fine on my not-so-awesome computer. The above picture is 48km though and should be more than enough 99/100 cases. Once the rain kicks up you can't see anything anyway ;p

I've also spent a fair amount of time working on my marketing skills. It's not something I personally like to do, but it's widely recognized as perhaps the most important step for a solo no-name dev like myself. If you don't know how to tell anyone about your campaign for awesome, it just flops its arms in the mud.

I plan to spruce up the UI, loading screens, and the opening screen a bit, and then start digging my heels in the dirt as I prepare for the biggest plea for help in my life, Kickstarter! There are of course alternatives I've been studying, so who knows. Ah for the day when I can call such a glorious profession my own! Until them, I'm here on my lunch break working for a completely unrelated company thinking up new angles to approach my remaining gamedev challenges with =]

Best wishes to you and yours in 2017!
It's going to be a wild ride for me!
Stay tuned!

Skills to make the kills

Last week I got biomes working in my new level system, currently with a snow and a desert biome mixing in with the main ocean/grassland/moutain biome. This way I can spawn biome specific resources, monsters, encounters and more.

I also simplified my cloud system to just do what I need it to right now, and it's working great. Mixed with a little sun and some minor post effects and we're not looking too shabby.

I also put in some of my speedtrees, which do look a lot better than normal unity trees. I'm not spending much time on them yet, but it's easy to make tons of them once you get one set up.

While on vacation the week before I set out to implement the first tier of skills for the four starter classes called Archetypes. These are made up of the Squire, Scout, Apprentice, and Disciple. Each Archetype starts out with six possible skills choices which are primarily attack focused skills to assist in the first few levels of combat and leveling.

Even before I started writing any code I knew I would need a very flexible system as skills in Solace Crafting are numerous and extremely varied, include player buffs, direct attacks, timed spells, passive abilities, and so on. My system is also a bit unique in that every skill has unlimited levels and needs to be able to scale and blend with other complimentary skills. I more or less had built similar systems before, but it's always great having a chance to start over and really know what you're going into.

The main obstacle is how to initiate skills that are not instant. The Scout has a tier one skill called Double Shot for example that fires two ranged attacks in quick succession. The second arrow has to launch shortly after the first arrow meaning we can't just call single function in one frame. Using coroutines and their yeild capabilities we can create loops for damage over time spells, wait for casting times to finish for complex spells like Meteor, or do a series of completely different things over time like teleport, attack, and warp back.

I have gained a ton of inspiration from League of Legends and their massive array of over five hundred skills, as well as from the classics like Dungeon and Dragons, Everquest, and many others. I plan to build a wide array of skills over time aiming to grant players the ability to be unique and interesting, rather than just cookie cut.

I'm starting now to work on two videos for Steam Greenlight and Kickstarter! Fun times! I will be signing up to IndieDB and more things as I build these two and other screenshots over the next couple weeks.

Vacation with work?

I am in Hawaii right now! My first vacation other than visiting my family in the states since as long as I can remember! Maybe seven or eight years since I went to Mexico. There are wild chickens, lots of different flora, and half naked humans everywhere!

It's vacation, but only from my day job. I love working on Solace Crafting and hope to get plenty time to code in the sun. I got a lot done last week, but here I am, up before sunrise while everyone else is still asleep. Coffee in hand I'm ready to code, but I'll post a little update as Saturday flew past me.

This week I implemented a universal equipment/buff/attack stat system, so that I can add more types of damage and stats over time; a few skills that can be learned, equipped, and used; basic pathfinding with A*, though it needs work; monster drops; improved inventory/item stats display; added character creation/loading to the start screen; as well as adding player buildings into the save/load equations, which took a little thinking; I also added monster scaling over distance, though it's just levels and hp/damage at this time.

I wasn't sure how I was going to go about the player building saving, but it turned out to work just fine. I had to move rotation into the storage script and was able to optimize the class a bit while I was in there. Being able to save progress is one of the biggest requirement of an RPG type game, but also a pretty complex deal when you start having thousands of items slots in the form of chests, and rewards scattered throughout dungeons or houses you've built over time.

Currently I'm working on implementing the first tier of all four early skill trees, called the Archetype trees. These are Squire, Scout, Apprentice, and Disciple. Each tree has six skills in the first tier and are action/attack heavy as this is where you want to pick your main attacks for the first few levels. I've got some ranged magic skills in, some power attacks, and am working on buffs/debuffs, as well as ranged projectile attacks at the moment.

After that I'll be working on some crafting improvements to make sure the set enchants work, as well as building placement checks to stop floating walls, and that kind of stuff.

The importance of good planning

This week, once again, I got a lot done: rare resources are spawning; crafting professions are leveling up; the reworked enchanting system works well; harvesting tool strength; reworked stat system with equip/unequip controls; stone and metal building materials; combat armor and damage calculation; dimension crystal crafting, placement, resource storage, and teleportation; encounter monster and loot spawning; as well as combat experience and levels.

That's not to say that all of those features are finished, but that they are all in and working.

Currently I'm finishing up the reworked skill system which is already working fine, I just have to finish the skill point management and "purchasing" of skills.

The past few weeks I've been talking about my minimalist approach to development, I thought I'd explain that quickly.
Imagine you have:

50 sections or feature genres in your game, and each one has
100 stages of completion. If each stage of each section takes
1 day to finish (that's 5,000 days)

you can spend 30 or 60 days on just one subject no problem, but then all the other 49 sections of your game, all important to it's playability and overall fun, go completely neglected. That was more or less how I was handling development before making a clear todo list and sticking to it. Now I'm making sure everything is level one before moving on to level two. A couple items might get an extra level or two here and there, but overall everything is evolving in an even fashion.

Sometimes it's hard to to settle for less than what you know you're capable of, but sometimes that's a smart decision when time and resources are extremely limited.

Next Saturday I will go on vacation (from my day job) for a week, and hope to get a decent amount of development time in. I will be out of the country for the entire 9 days, so there will definitely be lot's to do, but I'm counting on a fair share of downtime as well as two ridiculously long flights.

Tiny but lots of steps

Ever since taking on my minimalist stance of just getting everything working no matter how bad it works, I've been making great progress! This has probably turned out to be my most important lesson over the years. I could fuss on making the sunset perfect for months if I wanted to, but that's no way to go about developing a fun game.

This week I got basic saving and loading in, a simple starter screen, monster spawning, resource generation (requires some tricks for terrain based trees), weapon damage, some crafting features, encounter spawning(towers), and a simple recall spell in. I did spend a little too much time messing with biomes and terrain generation, but I learned some lessons.

This isn't the best screenshot... but I don't like posting without at least one picture. Pretty much everything you can see in this shot in unfinished, but the basic programming is all in and working. I have a speedtree license, and hope to use all original trees, but for now have some basic Unity Trees spawning in.

Dimension crystals, like the one in the screenshot, are the basis of long range travel, respawn points, and several other features. That's mostly what I hope to be working on next week. I have a 2d minimap I was using to show crystal locations throughout a world, but I might change that to an easier to use list.

The towers in the screenshot are far away, but you can absolutely run straight to them and climb up them. They don't spawn their own monsters and loot yet, but that's their main purpose and we'll get there soon enough. Eventually I plan to have different towers for each biome such as pyramids for desert, and endless mineshafts in the mountains (which might be hard to see from far away).

The biggest problems looming on the horizon at this point are monster movement/combat AI and pathfinding. I'm pretty confident in the rest of what I'm doing, I might be looking into some third party tools to cover those that area up rather than take up a bunch of my time at this point in development.

Lots of tiny steps, but all necessary, and adding up towards the big picture!