Solace Crafting

Solace Crafting
Redefining the Crafting RPG

Saturday, October 8, 2016

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!

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