Posted here is the transcript of our video. We hope you enjoy, learn a little about our game, and leave us some feedback. Please join us again next week for a look at how we implement a shroud in our new isometric dungeons, add player controls and more.
Welcome to this week's log on the Development of The 9th Wizard, Rings of Eternity. As you can see, visually the game has changed quite a bit, and today I'm going to show you how those changes have taken place and the guts behind our new isometric design.
Creating a game that is easily mod-able requires some very careful planning. We want every player to be able to create their own adventures, dungeons and quests without the knowledge of scripting or code. Likewise, we want the engine to be powerful enough to be worth using. The isometric world is the first step in that direction.
Not only does this environment open up more possibilities visually, it offers a viewpoint that delivers more information and a better atmosphere, but we are far from a finished product Our first concern is keeping it simple. As you can see in this image, it is as simple as it gets. The entire game has been broken down into data structures, meaning the game itself is nothing more than numbers, letters and symbols. This is a working dungeon designer. We also created a powerful script to create random dungeon designs.
Next we added the engine that will take a simple text file and turn it into a working dungeon. This itself requires a few steps. First, we created an isometric grid that generates walls and doors from the file.
Satisfied with how the engine built our dungeon from the data file, we began enhancing the engine to represent the dungeon world in an isometric view. Here you can see that we have added wall tiles. The green ones will become doors later on.
Next, we started looking at how the player would interact with the environment. Here we have a simple character that is locked into our grid structure, but movable with our mouse. The walls and doors appropriately calculate their depth, giving a three dimensional feel despite the two dimensional graphics. We were really excited by how this has started to look but we also found some issues.
If a character goes behind a wall, it can be difficult to see. As one possible solution, we added a function that will provide a transparency window around our character. This can be easily re-sized with the mouse wheel. We tweaked this quite a bit as we went along.
Now you see we've added a spiffy background image, some floor tiles and new tiles to represent our doors. We utilized dark color floor tiles to help represent the location of wall tiles that are transparent.
Please join me next week as I show you how we implement the dungeon shroud, lighting and player controls. We hope you enjoy seeing the changes to The 9th Wizard: Rings of Eternity.
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Hmm.. From a traditional rouge-like game, you made it into a slightly Diablo-esque style of RPG.
I can see that the map editor is quite simple to use.
Despite having a map editor, are there still randomly generated maps to play in or do we have to play pre-made maps?