Heart Realm Update #011

Since the last update I have finished the first version of the character screen. The purpose of this screen is to display the player character's stats, equipment, etc. as well as allow the player to distribute stat points that they receive upon advancing in character level. Obviously all User Interface stuff is temporary and will be updated throughout the development of this game. This current version is fine for getting it's point across.

Heart Realm Update #009

Since the last update, I haven't had a lot of time to work on Heart Realm. I'm actively searching for work so that's been taking up a lot of my time.

This past week I've focused on reworking how data is imported into the game. I was using XML files to store all the necessary attributes of the various item/equipment types and enemy types but figured it was unnecessary to store any redundant data of similar objects. For example, there's no point in having multiple data objects of two similar Goblin enemy types when I could just make one Goblin base then create variations off that, inheriting all it's parent's attributes and simply changing whatever I need. Here's an example of what I mean:

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 #005

So it's been two weeks since the last post, I just never got around to posting earlier because I felt that the progress I made wasn't worth posting about too much as it wasn't too glamorous.

Over the past two weeks I've been working on ways to implement enemy mobs and some of the various things associated with them.