Today I finished the gameplay arenas, that the beta-testers will use to (hopefully) provide me with more information about the balancing of the game. Balancing is something very tricky, and something I fear a lot… I have the theory that people will play a crap game with great balancing, but never a good game with […]
Today I created the arenas where the testing will take place, as most of the logic behind it… Now I just need to add the “queries” at the end of a fight, so that the beta-tester can give feedback like how hard it was, and why did he think that in a category way, so […]
Besides writing, I’ve started the arena system. The idea of the arena system is to have a mode that I can give the beta testers to test different situations and rate them appropriately, so I have a more objective set of measures to balance the game. In arena mode, the game starts in an easy […]
As end of “Phase Two” is approaching, I ended up with mostly writing and minor bug fixing to do… So, that’s what I did today… The main target of my debugging efforts was the teleporter… I haven’t messed with it for ages now, so it had a lot of broken pieces in it… Now you […]
Sort off… I’m a man that made bats work in the game, that makes me Batman, right? More importantly, I’ve finished the AI refactor! All the AI is now done through the new interfaces and works so much better than before! This was the biggest task still remaining on “Phase 2”… The rest is mostly […]
Finished the AI of the robotic spawns, which chase the player around and either explode or melee attack… I should have invested more on this kind of “swarm” enemies, they’re a lot of fun! Only one type of AI remaining! Now listening to “In Existence” by “Beautiful World” Link of the Day: Another trailer for […]
And done, the new illusion system is working properly (and in the process I cleaned up a nice piece of code regarding agro management)… These are going to be good lessons for the future… The first thought that an agro-based system was simple was really wrong… It’s a powerful system, but it has a lot […]
Finished work on the “follow” AI, which is used by NPCs on missions, but also in the Illusion Generator (which spawns some illusions that get attacked instead of the player)… The AI implementation went great for a change: But in the process I found a bucket load of bugs on the illusion system… This is […]
Finished the AI refactoring for the sandworm, plus added some more balancing to it… Also added a shaking camera effect when the worm approaches, because it’s cool and I can! Three more AIs to go! Now listening to “The Nexus” by “Amaranthe” Link of the Day: This is the first video on a series on […]
<sarcasm> For a change, this didn’t take long! </sarcasm> After 5 hours of grueling coding, I got the turret to work… Also improved the cannon effect and the balancing, but that’s a terrible consolation prize! Problem was that the turret had to use different “direction” system (since it’s a 3d object), and a different LOS […]