Week 38: Slime and Boomerang

Kind of a slow go on Wings of Albero this week, not helped by some general time-wasting on my part. I added a new enemy, a slime, and the first item ability, a boomerang attack a la Legend of Zelda. And a couple of new functions that aren't worth talking about.

So now we have slimes. I wanted them to split when you hit them, but ran into some nasty problems with TGB's collision physics response. Once there were several slimes close together, when a new one got placed they'd all go flying around like crazy and sometimes warp through walls. Not good. There are a couple of ways I could work around it, but I'd already wasted a couple of hours messing with it and it wasn't worth it. So, no splitting enemies this game.

The boomerang is the first item you'll probably find, in the jail cave. It normally stuns enemies for a couple of seconds. Some such as the knights are immune to it. The slimes are weak to it and actually take high damage from it, whereas your other attacks aren't as effective against them. (This is my substitute way to make the slime type interesting now that the splitting idea is dropped.)

Now I just have to make a way for you to actually GET the boomerang, and I'll be ready to move on to shopping, arrows, healing abilities, and I'd better get started on the further areas of the game soon....

Week 37: Smarter enemies, second alpha

Huh, guess I should make my official Week 37 post here. As everyone reading this has probably already seen, I put out the second alpha release this weekend. Most of the work I did was making the enemies smarter and aggressive rather than just random. It's been an interesting challenge figuring out how to make fun, varied battle gameplay with this contact-attack battle system I've chosen. I'll probably have more to say about that as a post-mortem once we can see how well it turns out in the end. =) Now it's time to charge ahead with more features -- chiefly sub-weapons and other items, shopping, and equipment upgrades -- and more content.

Alpha 2 released, and we've got forums!

Alpha version 2 is out. There is no additional content whatsoever in this release. *pout*

The main change is a drastic change to the behavior of all the enemies, making them much smarter and more aggressive. See what you think of the battles now and please share any suggestions. Also please tell me if it's too hard now! Remember, this is still the early part of the game, so I want the enemies to be interesting and to seem like they're actually trying to fight you, but not to be terribly dangerous overall.

Other changes:

• your shield blocks shots only when standing still
  
• you now bounce back slightly when attacking an enemy
• changed damage formula so that damage starts falling off more slowly once it's below 1/4 attack power
• various uninteresting bugfixes (note to self: if you're going to put in temporary code, mark it to be fixed later)

The alpha testing page with the game download has been moved to here, a post on our spiffy new forums. Enjoy! (I hope.)

Update: Video!

Wings of Albero (action RPG): smarter enemies (alpha #2) from Griffin Knodle on Vimeo.

Money

I've been thinking about ways to avoid that weird RPG tradition where everyone still charges you money even after it's clear that you're the only hope to save the world, etc. I've been thinking over systems where the villagers will help you for free, but you need to find the materials they need to make you equipment, potions, etc. Problem is, everything I've thought of so far is, on further review, either too restrictive to be interesting (you find some iron; would you like to use it to upgrade your sword, armor, or shield?) or functionally equivalent to money except more complicated and annoying to handle (you find an iron ingot and can turn it into some iron arrows or save up several for an iron sword, and also you find various herbs that you can turn into potions or save for magic training later, blah blah blah).

So enough. I'm now working on talking myself into giving myself permission to use a perfectly ordinary, perfectly serviceable money system. This sort of thing is difficult for me....

Week 36: In which nothing much happens

I've been busy with work work and catching up on all the things I neglected with the house during the push to alpha #1, so haven't made any progress on the game lately.

One of my friends brought up a tricky issue with the magic system I have planned. Your magic resource will be a fairly small stock that recharges quickly when you're not using it (already roughly this way in alpha 1). The desired gameplay result is that you'll be free to fire off a few spells when you decide that you need a boost in battle; you'll have to wait a bit between rounds of magic, so you want to choose a good spell at a good time and make it count; and you recharge fast enough that you might easily fire off two rounds of magic in a normal battle.

The tricky issue comes in if I provide any kind of healing magic. If your magic is unlimited and recharges quickly and you have a healing spell, then you have full recovery after each battle, which I don't think I want. But how to avoid that dynamic? I currently have these main ideas:

• No healing magic. The obvious and easy solution. Your health recovery is limited to a consumable healing item or limited stock thereof.
  
  
• Healing magic causes some kind of longer-term resource drain. I'm already considering having a "fatigue" penalty that you accumulate when you use your entire magic charge at once, probably something like making your magic recharge more slowly. Healing magic could always cause fatigue. Or another effect such as reducing your maximum magic charge until the next time you rest in town or whatever.
  
  The general idea is to add a downside to healing magic so that one wouldn't always want to heal up. But having the downside be some effect that weakens your character doesn't appeal to me so much, because I want you to feel free to use magic frequently without worrying about a long-term strategic resource (such as MP in typical RPGs), and in general I want to avoid the "dungeon of attrition" model that many RPGs follow.
  
  
• Healing fully will put you at risk to get attacked by more enemies before you're done. Maybe if you sit around for a certain time period, there's a continual chance for enemies to appear from one of the area entrances (with the certain time period such that it takes you longer to heal up from serious injury). Or, if you take some kind of fatigue penalty for magical healing, you can rest to recover from fatigue, but there's a chance for enemies to appear every time you rest.
  
  
• I just thought of this one, so it's totally not thought through: Healing magic temporarily reduces your maximum health each time you use it (or, healing magic becomes progressively less able to restore you the more you use it, to think of it that way).

I'm also thinking of how to restrict healing items (assuming I have some). I just want to avoid the "99 Heal Potions on the wall" syndrome. I keep thinking to limit your inventory space in some way. One thought is that you have a limited total capacity for consumable items ... which are basically "healing items and arrows" in this game, so making a pooled carrying capacity doesn't add much interest here. Better is to just limit how many healing items you're allowed to carry, probably by you having only a certain number of potion bottles (see A Link to the Past).

I've also thought of making you find ingredients for potions ... but that can suck if not handled well, and is really a way to substitute for money rather than an effective way to limit healing items.

No new alpha this weekend

On the off chance that someone is obsessively refreshing the page waiting for the next alpha version, I wanted to announce that it will not be out for this weekend. I've been too busy for the project lately, and I want the next alpha to have fixed up enemy behavior and hopefully some more content and features. So probably the weekend of the 14th.

Why does Albero give you Fire magic?

It occurs to me that because alpha #1 doesn't include any of the backstory, I should explain just why it is that the evil tyrannical wizard Albero is nice enough to leave the Fire magic lying around for you to pick up. Briefly, he was originally a good wizard and a good ruler, but his heart was captured by evil and desire for power. But long before that, he was wise enough to recognize that one day he or a successor might succumb to evil. So that the people would be able to fight against such evil, he left many magical items and powers scattered around the land. (His greatest magical item is the eponymous Wings, which allow a hero to fly to the floating tower that is the center of his power.)

(I may rework the story to make the villain be Albero's successor instead of Albero himself. Haven't decided for sure.)

Week 35: Alpha testing begins, Griffin takes a nap

I mostly took a much-needed rest today after working pretty hard to get a decent alpha #1 put together. I'm pleased with how it's going so far, but I have a lot of work to do.

It's become clear -- I was feeling it as I finished up the alpha version, and I've already gotten some feedback agreeing -- that the enemy behavior needs to be smarter and more aggressive. Currently, they all just move randomly. I thought that would be enough, considering that I do want these early enemies to be easy. Well, if this were a game where touching an enemy hurts you, then randomly moving enemies might work. But in this one, not at all. They're just not interesting or fun. So this is my #1 major task, even ahead of adding the rest of the planned content (of which there is a lot left to do).

Seems like there were other things that I wanted to ramble about, but I can't remember them and don't really have the energy anyhow. I'll leave you with a video of various clips from a playthrough of alpha #1.


Wings of Albero (action RPG): clips from alpha #1 from Griffin Knodle on Vimeo.

Alpha testing open!

I've released the first alpha testing version of Wings of Albero. The alpha test is open to the public and everyone is welcome. The alpha testing page with the game download is here.

It's missing a lot more than I would like, but it's got enough that I'm (barely) comfortable releasing it for alpha. The main gameplay is there in something like its intended final form, even though it's short, with most of the planned game not open to the player yet. More details tomorrow.