Heart Realm Update #013

As mentioned in my last blog post I have returned to Heart Realm, I'll be moving the game over to Unity, away from Java and all that. Along with that change I'll be making some changes to some systems, some of which were never really set in stone.

The reason for the change to Unity is partially due to my desire to work on the game more than the engine and the game, something I was doing when writing everything in Java. I've been using Unity now for the past 5 years now, working with it on and off on various smaller projects and so I feel comfortable enough with where it's at for me to work on this type of game using it.

Heart Realm Update #012

There's been a decent amount of progress since the last update including some minor changes to the damage/armor system and some basic spell casting functionality. That being said, this post is going to be quite wordy as I cover these things in detail.

Heart Realm Update #006

This week I decided to focus my time on combat. In doing so I started figuring out what happens when an enemy/the player is hit by an attack, and all necessary calculations that came with it. I also worked on the combat layer, which included some kind of AI for the mobs as well as a way for combat to actually start. To finish off the week, in keeping with the theme of combat, I added health/mana bars to the player and enemies (just health bar) and damage numbers when hit.

I'll go into detail about how the attack effect works first. When trying to solve the problem of what happens when a character, be it player or enemy, is hit, I need to come up with some formulas that calculated what happens in that instance. What came with that was figuring out all necessary calculations that needed to take place for whether you actually hit, how much damage you deal, and how critical hits work. The formulas took a little bit of time to figure out. I had to come up with a way that made sense in the context of this game and so it took me a few weeks figuring this out. Ultimately I came up with some formulas that I liked, which is what matters, and I felt were balanced, though we'll see as time goes on. Rather than just going through some long in-depth explanation of all the calculations, I think it'll be easier to just list them here as they're fairly straight forward.

Heart Realm Update #003

Another week has gone by some progress has been made. This past week or so I've focused mainly on ways to import data files, particularly for the armor item types. I initially tried just trying to create my own format in a text format, but ended up just using XML as it was what I was most comfortable with. The first thing I did once I actually got the data files working was create a few pieces of armor to mess around with. I constructed a few basic pieces of armor with all the necessary stats that I knew a piece of armor could have. I added in a way to also attach sprites for both the icon which you would see in the inventory and other menus, as well as the sprite that would sit on top of the character's sprite, drawn in the world, if applicable.

While these sort of additions weren't all that particularly new from a player's perspective, they are necessary to the game's overall structure and will allow for actual content to be made in addition to just art assets and maps.

Heart Realm Day 4... 5? I Don't Know What Day It Is. I'll Just Start Labeling These As Updates Instead. Update #002

So it's been a week since I last posted anything in the subject of Heart Realm. To be honest I was going to, except I felt that the progress I made over the past few days of actually working on the game wasn't too significant. It turns out trying to program while watching various youtube videos or movies on the second monitor can sometimes be distracting. Despite the distractions, I still spent a decent amount of time programming a bit and drawing a few sprites.

The reason there wasn't a post earlier was simple, there wasn't much visible progress. I pretty much spent the past few days laying out the Character, Item, Weapon, and Armor classes that are used for handling the player's stats and the various item types, respectively. Basically I felt it was too boring to really talk too much about as one day I spent just creating a few of those classes and naming some variables, that's it. Aside from that I also worked out how I'd like to handle the weapons in the game. Like many new designers, or just a lot of designers in general I suppose, I took inspiration from one of my favorite games, Dark Souls. I decided I wanted the weapons to work in a mix between Dark Souls and Dungeons & Dragons; version 4.0, I'm not too familiar with older versions as I've never really played D&D in general, plus the weapons are more straight-forward in 4.0 compared to 3.5 I believe.