A lot of things are all coming together and the side project itself is getting closer to being finished. For those following me on Twitter, you got a sneak peek when I shared the Alpha 5 link to play the browser version on Itch. I have now finished a major patch and it's time to talk about a few updates to this side project.
Dungeons
Around 12 days ago I had finished most of the main 10 maps and even made several dungeons. There are however a total of 17 dungeons and it was time to get to work on making them. All of these dungeons are smaller than the main map they are attached to. This is also a browser 2D game so they were kept reasonable in size and clear time.
Since it is a 2d space many of them move in a single direction. That just makes it easy for the player to see everything as they move about it. Otherwise, for the proper camera view, every area would need to be extra wide with a lot of dead space. Granted I did design some areas like that as well.
The biggest reason for wanting to get the dungeon work done is the fact that side quests would be one of the reasons the player will want to venture down into them. Most of them have an object you can loot in them for a turn in of some loot or money and experience.
In one of the dungeons, I put a little more effort and fun into it than the rest. That is because @Dksart created a spider sprite for me to play around with. I even created a side quest that leads the player down into the mine they are in.
For the moment like a lot of monsters in the game, they will need to be rebalanced for the area they are in. They are rather easy to kill for now. They will however change once I do a balance pass.
Questing
Another big update over the last public test was that quests have been added beyond the first map. This also included finishing two quest hub areas that the player will be able to get over 20 quests from between the two.
There are two main types of quests: item collection, and kill x amount. Item collection quests for the most part have a short backstory on why the NPCs want the item in question. Along with content clues if they don’t outright say where you can obtain the item itself if you are stuck.
Most of the kill quests are presented in the form of a bounty. Since I know kill quests are not always the most exciting thing the higher kill count ones will take some grinding and even having areas respawn to get enough kills. For now, most monsters respawn around 30 mins after they have been killed. Some of the quests offer some sweet rewards with one rewarding the player with one of the better items in the game.
The kill quest themselves required me to learn a little more about 001 Game Creator as I needed to access, and assign global variables for a kill count counter. Thankfully it was quite easy once I found under what menu global variables are. I then just had to add a trigger on a kill that increase the counter by 1 which was simple to do.
Questing for the most part still needs a lot of testing and I’m sure some fixes. With this being an HTMl5 project in 001 Game Creator if there is a bug in a quest it will backscreen and crash the game. I ended up having this happen with the second NPC for quests I created. That has since been fixed.
Next Up
Now that everything is coming together for a larger picture. I need to do a lot of playtesting and add in some finer details as I spend a good chunk of time in different areas. Along with a lot of rebalancing of monsters and items in the game.
The testing part tends to take a lot longer than one would expect. I need to make sure that something that worked while playtesting in the engine is working as intended in the released environment it’s going to be played in. While you can test in a “web browser” it’s just not the same and bugs do get passed over.
While testing things from the engine I can at least spawn in some chests with gear and cheat a bit. It is tempting to set up a non-public version in the actual environment it will be in with the different things that would help speed up my testing.
It is however something you need to be a bit careful about doing and ensuring it does not end up in an actual shipped release. There have been quite a few funny moments when gamers in other games come across a game developer's testing room or they leave a chest full of loot in the shipped version by mistake.
There are also some other things I need to get around to doing while working on the menu. Like any project, I expect I’ll be finding a lot of little ends and bits that will need some work on. At some point, I’ll put out another patch.
Final Thoughts
Outside of the testing and a couple of things here or there, this has moved quite quickly. It has been around 16 days since I started working on this side project and in the 001 Game Creator engine that I did not have much if any experience at all.
After this phase is done I’ll start looking into how 001 Game Creator is on the multiplayer side of things. It would be cool if I could take things beyond just being a game I put on Itch and move onto something else. That however is going to take some time and I’m not quite sure what limitations I’ll start running into using this game engine.
It has been quite a fun journey so far to play around in a different game engine. Go from some basic ideas to having around 100 items dropping off dozes of monsters in dozens of zones in such a short amount of time.
The game can be played on the Enjargames Itch page here.
Other Content
- 001 Game Creator | Part 5: Working on Items, Compile, And HTML5 Test
- 001 Game Creator | Play Testing And Quest Scripting
- 001 Game Creator | More Maps Part 3
- 001 Game Creator | More Maps
- 001 Game Creator | Giving It A Try
Information
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar. Screenshots are from 001 Game Creator.
