Firing up the engines

After about three months of being mostly on hiatus, I'm getting back to work. I'm currently making a detailed plan of what exactly I'll be putting in the rest of the game, mainly what new enemies to make. I'll post my detailed task list when it's done for anyone who's interested.

The most important thing is for me to remember that this is meant to be a beginner project, and it's okay for it to suck. Hopefully it won't, but I just need to get it done in any case. My perfectionist streak is part of why I've been taking a break. Gotta fight that.

Version 0.900, and a real web site

Sorry for the radio silence lately. It's way past my bedtime, so details will have to wait, but for now: Version 0.900 is out. Head on over to the new web site and try it out.

Week 39: Life intervenes

I've been sick and busy, my wife's been sick and very busy, and our poor doggie's been very sick. In short, I haven't done much on the project lately and haven't touched it for a few days. All I've done is some planning, and made some design decisions I'd been putting off. Most notably: No healing magic; various potions for healing and other effects, bought with money, no inventory limit, so balanced by money resource instead (this means I'll have to balance the player's money carefully, but that shouldn't be too hard); arrows cost money per shot but have no stock limit (like in original Legend of Zelda). You may notice that in all cases I've chosen the easiest and simplest design option out of the ones I've considered. Yep. No time to make things any more complicated than they need to be.

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....