2011 wrap-up, hello 2012!

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,300 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 22 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

 

I’m slowly trying to build up some motivation to push this project forward, but other things are battling for my attention, so it’s not easy.

Anyway, TRS is not forgotten and should see new things coming in 2012, the fourth year since I began this project.

 

Happy new year!

NIP – Nothing In Progress

It’s been a while since I reported progress here.

Well, the next build is ‘almost ready’ since at least a month now, but I need to really test it before I publish it, so it’s still sitting on my harddrive.
I wanted to spend a good amount of time polishing this build, but motivation has dramatically fallen this summer, for various reasons.

Sorry for the delay, and I won’t make new guesses for when I’ll publish the build. I hope soon, but I really don’t know.

Mixed news and features

I’ve got several things to say about TRS on very different topics, here they are in one single blog post.
 
First, I’m a bit ill, hopefully nothing too serious, but it might keep me from spending too much time on computers, as it affects my eyes. I’ve found some time to hack at TRS despite that anyway.
 
Next, I’ve created some tools to help me design UIs faster. I’ve been avoiding this for long, as I’m still worried by the state of Guichan: project isn’t actively maintained anymore, it’s still lacking important widgets I’ll have to design myself, etc… But, trying to integrate another UI kit in replacement got me banging my head against the keyboard, so, Guichan it will be for some time to come.
 
The first piece of new UI using these tools is a new global interface, which will vastly improve user experience by exposing features in a user-friendly way (mouse activated as opposed to finding keyboard shortcuts in a Readme file). The current widget set forces me to change the ‘speed up’ feature to become a ‘toggle’ instead of a ‘push’ mode. That bothers me a little, but not too much, let me know what you think.
 
Lastly, I’d like some feedback on a kind of dilemma I’m stuck in. I want to add loot to the game. And I see one interesting way of doing it, but it would steer the gameplay toward a much more active kind, and that wouldn’t be easily reversed afterwards.
My idea is to remove the monsters’ automatic respawn, so the player can collect loot as a separate phase from combat. If I went that way, I’d also add ‘attacks of opportunity’ to monsters. Then the player would have to manually manage a lot of things to make the adventurers act.
Another possibility is to put a much longer respawn than currently, or maybe tying it to the quest completion. That would also change the pace of the game a lot.

So, please, be my guest, comment or mail me!

New monster upgrade system

There is some major stuff coming for the future releases. Here is one part.

First thing coming, as it has generated too much negative feedback, I’m currently reworking the monster/spawn point upgrade system. It will be simpler to figure out, and with a new GUI, which will make things better looking as well. So there will still be the spawn point level but the monster itself will only have ‘minor’ upgrades instead of a complex computation for levels. Here’s an explanation of the new system.

Let’s consider a spawn point level 1, with a stock monster. Say it starts at 100 ‘points’ (to avoid thinking in terms of health, attack, etc…).

You can upgrade the monster 3 times. Each time will get you a 25 points boost, so that 125, 150 and 175. Now if you want to get it higher, you have to upgrade the spawn point to level 2.
When you upgrade the spawn point, the monster gets to level 2 stock, or 200 points. Then you can purchase upgrades to get it to 225, 250 and 275, etc…

I think it makes sense quickly, I just have to figure out the upgrade costs so it’s fair. I think the monster upgrades will be quite cheap and not very effective, so maybe 20 points or even 15 instead of 25, whereas the spawn point upgrade will cost you a lot, but will be dramatic in terms of monster improvement.

The new UI will hopefully make it very easy to understand.

Build 018 – Sprite patch

Here is a very quick post to provide a small patch for Builds 018 & 019.

http://tinyrpgsim.free.fr/pub/TinyRPGSim%20-%20Build%20018%20Sprite%20patch.zip

This fixes the new Adventurer sprite’s sword, which was transparent due to a conversion mistake.

To apply this patch, unzip it and put the two image files in the data/sprites/ folder.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

Build 019

Here is the fresh build! One major feature added, some visual improvements, but overall, it’s a ‘transition’ build, to make way for more content.

Changelog:

2011-05-22: Build 019
– Created the Personality system. Now Adventurers have personality traits
which affect their behavior.
– First personality traits: fearless, coward and berserk.
– Added personality name to the Adventurer info popup.
– Added more equipment (given randomly at creation), tweaked stats.
– Tweaked balancing (not. monsters attack, health replenishing).
– Added a shadow to Adventurers and Monsters [experimental].
– Reduced sprite scale in Castle view.
– Fixed some sprite bugs, especially when Adventurer was ‘idle’.

Here it is: http://tinyrpgsim.free.fr/pub/TinyRPGSim%20-%20Build%20019%20-%202011-05-22.zip

As always, enjoy, and please give any feedback you want, here, or on TIGsource or by email (see Contact page).

Slowly readying next build

It’s been a while since I’ve given news, because there were personal changes preventing me from spending a lot of time on this. Well, now I’ve got a new job, things are settling, and I can think about TRS’ next build!

I’ve implemented a system to let ‘things’ affect behavior and battle outcomes for the Adventurers. ‘Things’ is a generic term here, although in the short term it will be only ‘personalities’ that I’m adding. I’ve still got to add more content to make it worthwhile, at the moment, I’ve done the ‘coward’ personality, I can easily make its counterpart heroic character, then I’ll find some more.

Oh, and I’ve given all creatures, including the heroes, a constant shadow, to give more depth to the visuals. This is a temporary improvements, before I overhaul the sprite/animation system to handle that correctly. I’ll make screenshots to show that as soon as possible.

Thanks for reading!

Build 018

Here is the new build!

Changelog:
2011-03-06: Build 018
– New Adventurer selection system.
– Removed initial free Adventurer.
– Added more initial DP to spend, so an Adventurer is affordable.
– Added more Adventurer sprites from Ed Zuk.
– New Adventurer info popup, just double-click an Adventurer.
– Sorted data folder with sub-folders. This makes it easier to maintain, and
thus to add new stuff.

http://tinyrpgsim.free.fr/pub/TinyRPGSim%20-%20Build%20018%20-%202011-03-06.zip

It doesn’t have much new features yet, it’s more a preview build for the new GUI. It *does* feature new content, in the form of a new sprite, from Ed Zuk, thanks a lot! I will try to put more of his work on the next build(s).

Adventurer Info Window

Following up on Next features: the Adventurer (part 2), here is the first screenshot of the actual window in action.

Adventurer Info Window

As you can see, it’s quite empty of useful information yet, but most of the structure is in place. Now the coding of the actual new features can have visible results (stats, log, house, characteristics & personality, etc…)

Soon, the next build…

New Adventurer window

Just a quick update, before getting back to coding…

Here is a screenshot of the game with its new popup in place. You can also see the second sprite set used.
Classes and characteristics aren’t done, only name and personality are really generated, and personality isn’t used yet.

Screenshot of the New Adventurer window

 

PS : this is a follow-up of this post.