Ye Olde Blah

This is a running thread where I'll post any updates to the game worth mentioning since the beta release.


First contribution: removed a few teleport bugs and built the first in-game puzzle, as part of the Church of the Question Mark. :)

Making sprites is taking far longer than I'd like, so I'm now creating my own sprite editor, forking it off the tile editor. It will (again) feature a heap of buttons which are intended to make the process of creating sprites semi-automatic.

Oooh, a sprite editor sounds cool! Spriting stuff is probably my least favourite thing (mainly because I suck so badly at it), so anything that helps with that would be awesome. What sort of features are you planning on adding to it?

Well, first of all it will be entirely geared towards handling PNGs at 48x48 resolution, so the editor will be straightforward to use for other game projects.

If people like it, I'm also wiling to enable a 24x24 export, although I'm sure people know where to find the resize tool (it's extra easy because Shiny Sword Sprites are 50x100 with a 2 pixel width padding ;)).

So far it has all the relevant features from the tile editor, it can import png's and it can save sprites to png. Also, I just got an 'additive load' working.

The additive load will allow you to load a sprite, and then "add" its contents to the existing sprite in the editor. This is particularly helpful for humanoid sprites, because you can make 'head' sprites, 'armor' sprites, 'clothing' sprites and trivially reuse those in different contexts.

Later on, I'm also considering to put in a widen/narrow button, so that you can change the width of your sprite in an approximate manner with the click of a button (in the case of widen you will need to adjust the central row of pixels manually afterwards to reflect something sensible).

Oh, and as with the tile editor, it will NOT have an undo button.

I am increasingly believing that undo buttons actually encourage the bad practise of making complicated and unreproducible sprites/tiles on the long term :).

Hmm... a lot of progress today.

Ty, if you check out the SVN version, you'll find the Sprite Editor in SMEE to be now pretty much fully working ;).

I just have to add the widen buttons and the ability to easily move sprites left/right/up/down in the box :).

Oh well, I added the scroll buttons too now.

But now I'll call it a day. I personally like the sprite editor already. I took a character, separated the head, torso and legs (like with LEGO) and I now have much easier time changing these, and composing new sprites with the individual pieces.

Mission accomplished ;).

Added a Guard Barracks quarter, and implemented a first rebels quest. I also made several new guard sprites using the modular sprite editor.

The color replace buttons are in now, but the widen buttons may not arrive at all (they seem less practical than I thought ;)).

Hey Devlyn, that sprite editor sounds great :)
Can you release that separately as well for us?

Hey Elv,

I forgot to answer this, but currently the sprite editor is still sort of grafted to SMEE. I would have to split off the code in a separate exercise for that, but you can use it in its current form already.

Today I fixed a few small bugs and I added a blur button in the tile editor. While at it, I blurred a few of the terrain tiles, so that the soil on the walking maps becomes a bit easier on the eye...

And today I enhanced the AI. There are now not one, but 5 AI modes.

random, aggressive, careful, default and healer (latter one seeks friendly units as well as enemy ones).

I still have to implement enemy spellcasting, but this is an important step towards it.

Those sound pretty good. How aggressive is the default compared to the others? Can enemies switch between modes?

Well, the default mode charges in if an enemy is within range. However, it will only very gradually move towards the player when an enemy is not in range.

In aggressive mode, the 'range' is deliberately extended by a factor 3, and the enemy will prioritize closer ranges over longer ones, but even enter a longer one although it may not be able to attack yet that turn :).

The AI system is very easy to change, so I'll just see how these ones work and change them, or add new ones. The type is just an entity specific variable, so I could have it easily changed by land type, or through events if convenient :).

Custom AIs are relatively easy to make by the way. All the AI code resides in AIEngine.java at the moment, and the moving strategy (which goes through a point scoring system for each accessible tile) is defined in one, relatively short, function.

Revision #100 has been comitted :). This revision contains a fully working church of the question mark puzzle quest, and I started on pictograms for a better walkabout interface. I also made exp and gold giving case insensitive.

And another update today. I put in the new context menu interface for the walkabout maps.

In addition, it is now possible to switch party leaders, allowing you to do dialogues with a different character. In time I will also add mechanisms that will adjust how NPCs will respond to different party leaders :).

Blimey Dev, you're on fire :) I manually updated the Shiny Sword commit log page with all this cool new stuff.

The party leader switching sounds interesting - looking forward to seeing it in action :)

Thanks :). I don't promise any new demos soon, and I expect progress to slow in the near future, but at the moment I am putting in some interesting things. I somehow feel I want to throw in a bit more story flavor and gameplay before making an official release.

For one, I started on a second large town (Talakku) and I am also implementing a mechanism for Tile Groups.
Tile Groups will allow you to lay down multi-tile structures (e.g. large trees, houses or towers) with a single mouse click. Tile groups will be simplistically stored as a set of numbers, and will be tileset specific.

The main advantage of Tile Groups is that it saves me time in making maps, and...on the long run... that it makes it much easier to build a sophisticated random map generator.

Tile groups are now working.

For example, this allows you to lay down a 6x6 tile house, including obstacles, using a single mouse click :).

Excellent, that is a really handy feature :)

Thanks :). I've made more updates in the meantime, including a few new sprites, enhancements to the sprite editor, and other things I forgot about... ;)

I'm not sure about an official release yet... I have time to add features and small things, but I'm not sure if I'll have time to go through the ordeal of packaging and documenting everything ;).

Guys...just wanted to say that this project is still not dead ;).

In fact, I've added a huge number of new features and tweaks. This time most of them were subtle, but keep track of the commit logs to see what all is being added :).

And now I've started doing a slight overhaul of some tiles and maps. The graphics will never be smashing, but I think they're now a bit better than they were... :).

Short update here. I made an enormous number of changes over Christmas. These include:

- more maps.
- two new organizations with quests.
- several new battles.
- support for traps, doors (with keys) and locked chests.
- support for notifications (short messages from party members which add flavour but do not conjure text boxes).
- a *lot* of new tiles.
- several new terrain types.
- a new poison status, which gives players an x % chance to lose a hit point at every step they take.
- a lot of bug fixes :).
- a lot of new NPCs :).
- probabilities for characters. Some characters and events now only happen... *sometimes*.
- Expanded sewers, and two new dungeons.

Nice work! I was reading through the list of commits and saw some stuff about traps that caught my attention. Looking forward to trying it out!

Btw. I do still have problems committing to the SVN repo, as I keep getting checksum errors. However, I do now have a private repo in Github which I use as a backup.

Do you have any idea how we could solve these checksum errors?

Bugger, I was hoping I'd managed to fix that.

It might work to checkout the current version from the server, then copy your current working copy across. Something like this: http://andrew.hedges.name/blog/2009/01/25/how-to-recover-from-checksum-mismatch-errors-in-svn

If not, can you zip up your entire working copy and email it to me (ty@shiningsource.net)?

Oh, I never got around to this, but I'll zip it up and send it to you straight away :).

By the way, I added several more maps, and I inserted the first lever puzzle in the game :).

Major update here. Opponents can now cast spells, both offensive ones and healing spells :).

AI is still clunky though, that'll need a bit more work...

Another major update. I did a complete overhaul of the item system. Weapons are now highly tactical, with properties well extending beyond basic damage, and I can select different materials which automatically modify the source images to give each weapon a distinct look.

Also, the first siege battle is in, which includes a Fortress the player can conquer, and where he/she has to take down walls in addition to the opponents.

Nice work Dev! Looking forward to trying out these new features once I get my PC repaired ;)

Many more changes are coming up. I already added more quests and made more sophisticated land effect rules. The setting is also becoming richer although I do need to still add larger plotlines and story sequences into the game. Modulo any remaining bugs, I think one could easily spend 4-5 hours trying to get through all the battles and quests now.

Basic materials and smithy system is in place now. You find the ores, they'll make you the weapons.

Soon, weapons will be able to break and shatter as well!

...but first I added a horse, a tavern with conversation and several new tiles ;).

I also redid all the player and monster stats to ensure a better balance in the game.

As of today there are portraits in the games when you chat to different people. I already drew 10 portraits and I plan to make many more! :)

Revamped status screens! :)

Looking good Dev! Can't believe how far this has come in the last year or so.

Love the empty slot icon too ;)