Player Avatars

I’ve turned my attention to the UI for my cartoony RPG. Although I’m still not done working on the dungeon texturing, I realized I’ve been wasting too much time on those experiments. Rather than becoming mired on one thing, it’s much more productive to just move on with the rest of the game and come back to that later. Who knows, maybe I’ll end up commissioning an artist to make some new textures.

Anyway here’s how the UI looks so far (notice the player portrait and health/mana meters in the top corner):

Flock following Waypoints

As mentioned last month, I rebuilt a couple old projects in WebGL. One of these old projects was actually my first creation in Unity!

Algorithm for Aiming at a Moving Target

There are a couple old projects I recently realized aren’t visible anymore (because they were using old player technologies) so I decided to dust them off and do WebGL builds of them. I’ll talk about the other next month, but in this blog post I just want to focus on one, the demo of an algorithm I devised for aiming at a moving target. The interactive demo is on my space at itch.io:

Keeping the streak going

I should go into the archives to see if this is true, but I’m pretty sure this blog has had one post a month since its inception. I have nothing much to talk about this month, but by Reorx’s beard I am not breaking the streak now!

As one bit of semi-noteworthy news, I’m attending MIT Reality Hack next month. Never been to this event before, hope it’s interesting.

AR news: Porting Demolo, Giving Talk

I have two bits of news relating to my work with augmented reality: I’m giving a talk about AR in Unity, and I’m gearing up to port Demolo to AR headsets.

Texturing the Procedural Dungeon

I’ve been putting a lot of thought into the textures for my dungeon crawler. This is a screen recording showing one of the possibilities I’m exploring:

Game development quotes

Years ago I wrote down in my notes a great quote about game development. It was something said by Jerry Holkins, one of the co-creators of the comic, back when the first Penny Arcade game was coming out. The quote was great and that’s why I noted it down, but like a dummy I didn’t keep the source where I saw it. Well with the help of people online, I finally tracked it down!

Here’s a photo of the article (or rather, his sidebar to a longer article) in the August 2008 edition of Game Developer magazine:

What happens when you Google my name

The latest updates to my game still aren’t visual (eg. systems-level stuff) so for this month’s blog post I’m just gonna tell you about an amusing thing I was reminded of recently. If you search Google for my name, you see my photo with a death date of 1937:

Common Interface for Actor Objects

This month there isn’t really anything visual that’s changed with my turn-based dungeon crawler. Instead, this past month has been a lot of invisible structural work. For example, there hadn’t been any way to complete a dungeon and start a new one, so I added in an end location to reach. Meanwhile, I’ve also been doing a lot of refactorings and code cleanup, one of which I want to highlight in this post.

Specifically, I created an interface for the various interactive objects to share. While it’s not where I learned of this programming construct, the following video is a pretty good explanation of what I did:

WIP Random Monsters, Combat, and Loot

Last month I showed off grid-based movement in a randomly generated dungeon, but now I’ve added the beginnings of combat, the beginnings of loot/treasure, and (most crucially) randomly generated monster sprites! Here are screenshots of the enemies taken from different play sessions: