Spooky Action at a Distance Games

Second, shadowcasting (great job, Maria!), which will be used for:

• vision,
• lighting
• and ranged combat.

Obstacles can have different permeability for light and projectiles. For example:

• smoke can be very thick but completely “transparent” for bullets,
• while armored glass is the opposite of it;
• smoke and glass both can be 50% translucent, and a wooden wall can provide only 50% of cover.

But enough words, here’s a picture of obstacle shadows and target visibility:

Just lazy about the blog.
Let me share a few new parts of our engine.

First, animation engine (by Maria) and Tiled map editor integration (by hugh):

Credits for art used:

• Map tiles: anonymous OpenGameArt contributor,
• character: body/female/reptiles/red_winged.png: by Nila122, Johannes Sjölund (wulax), Stephen Challener (Redshrike) on OpenGameArt one two three,
• clothes: ElizaWy, Marcel van de Steeg (MadMarcel) on OpenGame Art one two.
• clothes: bluecarrot16, David Conway Jr. (JaidynReiman), Joe White, Matthew Krohn (makrohn), Johannes Sjölund (wulax) on OpenGameArt one two
• character sheet created in Universal-LPC-Spritesheet-Character-Generator.

A lot of project have devlogs. It’s motivating, it may serve your promotion, but mainly it creates some connection with people who like your project.

Legend, inspired me to continue blogging.

In the last two weeks our prototype got:

• Shooting! You can:
  • shoot volleys (the weapons are described in JSON and can be created arbitrarily);
  • kill mobs;
  • miss! (I invented an original weapon accuracy formula);
  • reload;
  • see the mob in focus, its HP and hit probability;
• Vision field (thanks to bracket-pathfinding);

An animated GIF is worth two thousand words, so here you go – a testing map, and then the data that defines it:

As some may notice, the demo is taking a bit of inspiration in my favorite roguelike, Jupiter Hell. Go buy it. Yes, it is totally worth it. No, the price will not be lower.

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Our fantastic screenwriter has finished a scenario plan and is pushing me towards a minimal combat/plot demo. He’s absolutely correct, and it means I have to finalize the essential combat features like:

• mob inventories;
• simplistic monster AIs (wander, seek, shoot back);
• time, (where each action may take a different amount of time, and this defines turn order);
• shotguns;
• melee;
• cover;
• (maybe) destructible environment;

And non-combat plans for the demo:

• redo the conversation UI – it’s supposed to be nonmodal;
• and, very likely, migrate to graphics. With the tech I want (pixel graphics + lighting), it’s a huge task, but, er, I really want it.

I want our screenwriters to have a great tools, in order to be able to:

• Write dialogues/quests in a simple, human-writer-readable-writeable format;
• Quickly run and test them;
• Be able to do automated validation: dangling brancehs, branch prices/probabilities

When I searched for a dialogue engine (format + editor/prototyping tool + library) at the beginning of the project, I only paid attention to Ink and Twine.

Ink is mostly suitable for IF (interactive fiction), not CRPGs.

Twine‘s integration into game engines is mostly nonexistent, and its format is a cryptic Javascript embedded into HTML.

So, I wrote my own dialogue engine and language (see the previous post). A prototype of such, but anyway.

What happened next?

I found YarnSpinner!

• It integrates into Unity (who knows, we might end up there. Everybody uses Unity).
• The syntax is simple, and there’s a grammar definition, almost ready to be reused in my own parser.
• It has a rapid prototyping tool, too.
• It can both integrate the RPG engines’s state into its formulas, and change it by sending “command messages” to the integration API.
• And it has stuff I didn’t think about, like localization support and the above-mentioned commands.

Sigh.

I’m seriously considering throwing Talk (my dialogue DSL) away and rewriting my dialogue engine in YarnSpinner.

OTTH…

I looked for “nested Stories” tool for a bigger game, because dumping all story nodes on one screen scales pretty horribly.

Only one tool, Articy Draft, can do it. It’s a commercial tool, with an unreasonable monthly subscription cost ($60/month), but luckily, it has a once-purchaseable Steam version for $100. Much better than $60/mo.

The quest continues.

As the main point is the story, I (@HughHoyland) decided to provide a tool to the screenwriters. What is a good tool, from a programmer’s perspective? A programming language!

A couple basic ideas were borrowed from Ink, a really impressive language to write interactive fiction in. Namely:

• An idea of a DSL that is as close to normal story text as possible. CRPG, though, is very different from IF, so we cannot take it as is;
• The idea of a hub that consists of:
  • an NPC’s opening line,
  • and player’s choices (words or actions), which lead to other hubs of the conversation and/or change the state of the world.

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