Class Selection
This weekend was rough it being Easter and all and having a 3-year-old, but I managed to completely rework the class and profession selection screen.
Basically you decide what primary class you are (Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, Whatever other classes I add), then you also select a profession class, I plan on having some extra non profession classes you can choose such as starting with more food, or extra equipment in the event you didn’t want any profession.
I added some temporary graphics to the interface and pushed out the update, since the classes currently have no relevance once you are in game I can add tons of these, I also programmed it already for the classes to have passive game bonuses but currently the game doesn’t use them, I was thinking something along the lines of if you are a miner you get a better chance of rare materials when mining, etc.
Hopefully David will get me some neat tiles to represent the various classes, I also added the background drawing from the main menu to the class selection screen since I did away with the big backgrounds.
Here is a screenshot of the interface!
World Generation:
The world is pretty big assume that a simple tile is about 1×1 meter the world itself is about 10×10 kilometers (or 6×6 miles), I am pretty happy with that.
Anyway to get back to it I noticed the tree and river growth made it difficult to move around and with player crafted bridges being nixed for right now moving around the world would prove pretty difficult for the player, with that in mind I tweaked world generation and backed out the resolution of the simplex noise generation and tweaked the tree spawn, and added some non simplex mountain formations that are small the result turned out pretty good, there is open space to move around and the rivers are much bigger in size and IMO looks much better.
Here is what the old world generation looked like compared to the new:
New WorldGen:
Here is a picture showing the bigger rivers in game with a slime bugging me:
Slime:
I worked mostly on some issues with NPC drawing and added some behind the scenes stuff to make varied NPC types easier to draw with different methods and higher resolutions.
A bunch more work is so hit locations are valid for the new sizes in game as well as the scaled mobs.
I added a mechanic to slimes so that if they are very close they will combine to a larger slime with a higher level (Which will have more health and do more damage), this is the very early stages of this, I don’t want to keep the slime graphics as they are now and I would like to add some particles and some animation for the combine.
I Also need to make the health bar scale with the mob size accordingly.
Here is a early video of the slime combining method:
Please note this is not drawn in perspective, nor is it drawing it in the proper order!
Combat:
I did some work on combat as well, I have a nice little development document written up here about what I want to do and playing around with the static weapon animations I think it needs something more significant to feel good, so I think I might end up adding combo’s where the character will do something like swing, swing, stab, stab, something cool.
I also need to rework hit detection based on the mobs approximate on screen size, I am going to use approximate hit boxes so that even scaled mobs detect hits properly.
I am going to change it so instead of doing an attack on the player (for stuff like the slime) just touching the player is what does damage this will make the AI much simpler for the slime.
I just really need a good few hours to sit down and really play test all of this to find a system that feels right, right now its not horrible but its not amazing by any means.
