Cristalia : Crystals Android game

4 comments by monsieur_max on Jul 18th, 2010

Last weeks, I worked on implementing basic features of an action RPG games. This was not quite easy, as the first try always lead to gameplay questions and re-factoring answers.

-People

Putting people was not really hard. I had all the gfx for it. The tricky part here that there were a bit of code re-factoring to do. Things are rather nice now as we have a basic object called "Being" that does basic things. This being is animated and can have a specific behaviour. For now, only the "walk around" behaviour as been coded, just for the proof of concept. Having people walking around the town really puts some life in the game.

-Interaction

People are not really interesting if they only move around. Any rpg game has a basic story, and speaking NPC's helps to make the game more realistic. They usually share a single thought but it's enough to give a bit of taste to the game. I implemented a simple interaction feature. When you click on a being or even on an object (designed for) you can fire an interaction. The "clicking" feature has been a bit hard to tweak. The main problem was that it was not really responsive. Clicking on a people usually led to nothing and you had to click several times to manage to fire the interaction. After some tweaks involving maths, cogs and java, the system is really good now.

-Scaling

When I started to code the Cristallia engine, I only had my old Android Dev Phone. It's an 1.6 device running on a 480*320 screen resolution (and was damn expensive when I bought it :(). Today's phones are more powerfull, have better screen resolution and newer Android version.

When you're developing on Android, you always have to test your program on many phones, especially when it's a game. Screens are different, OpenGL is not implemented the same way, Touch screens are not the same. It's a bit messy. Luckily, my previous game, Pocoro, made me earn a Nexus One from Google. After a bit of testing, I knew that I had to change things on my engine. On such a big screen with this humongous amount of pixels everywhere, the sprites were really small. Too small. 

So I decided, that on any phone, the display should be the same or at least very similar. I just need to test this on a QVGA screen (sony X10 mini and HTC wildfire)

-Weapon

Any action RPG is a lot less fun with no weapon in it. Implementing weapons has been easy so far. Things are not finished but as a proof of concept, the hero can draw his sword upon clicking the screen. Any being identified as a foe is hit when the sword touches him. For now, only drawing and hit detection works. I have to implements a life point system, add other weapons such as a spear, a bow, for the least.

That's all for now :). If you guys have any comment or advice, I'll be very glad to read them!