Finishing portraits and dungeon textures

I decided to tweak the look of the portraits I added last month. I kept the same slate of portraits, but now they have a circular colored background, plus I’m probably going to vary the color of the shirts. Here are the easily recolored SVG files (ie. vector images) for the portraits:

Character Creation Options

I’m not planning to have a super in-depth character creator for this simple RPG, but I do plan to have some basic options. Here’s a collage of the portraits players can select:

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):

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:

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:

Grid-based movement for both Player and Enemies

Last month I had implemented dungeon generation for my first-person roguelike/RPG game, but it wasn’t populated yet, nor could you move around it. Well, I’ve since programmed that stuff.

Two additions: BSP dungeons and A* pathfinding

As I blogged about a couple months ago, I’m writing a little RPG for a fun hobby project. I was inspired by this twitter thread about a random monster generator, and I designed a tabletop rule system to use. Since then I’ve been implementing things in Unity, and this month I want to talk about the first two things I programmed: procedural dungeon generation, and grid-based A* (or A-star) pathfinding.

New RPG system and More zombie action

Two biggish (well, big enough to blog about) updates from last month: the enemies in Train Zombies now fight back, and I’ve been designing a new RPG system for a game project.

Rebuilding year (er, month)

Not a ton to report this month. I released Demolo last month, which allows me to reflect on it. Meanwhile I’m gearing up to resume working on my first-person dungeon crawler. And then I’ve also been considering a little video project, so I’ll describe that too.