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.

The Return

It's been a while since I've posted here. Why is that? I just honestly haven't made it a habit to write here and I've just gotten caught up in life in general.

To start off I'm now officially working in the video game industry (for more than a year now). I started off at a company by the name of Phosphor Games as a QA tester working there on two different contracts for 9 months with a 2 month break between those contracts. At Phosphor I started off testing a game called WARP for Android and iOS that was unfortunately cancelled prematurely ending my contract with Phosphor. I returned 2 months later to work on a couple games one that was recently released, Gemini: Heroes Reborn for Xbox One, PS4, and PC, as well as Heroes Reborn: Enigma for Android and iOS that was released last fall. I also did a little bit of testing when needed for the game Corpse of Discovery, released last August for PC.

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 #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 #010

I recently got back into working on Heart Realm after having been away from it for about a month or so. I had been working on another project which I started with the intent of it being a short term project, as in I don't plan on working on it as long as Heart Realm and would hope to finish it in a much shorter time.

Since the last update I had worked out how I would go about implementing Lua scripting into the game. I came across a Java library called LuaJava which I had some trouble implementing due to some compatibility issues. Turns out it was just something stupid. The .dll and .jar files were compiled to run with a 32-bit JRE, and I was running a 64-bit JRE. My initial solution was to run the make files provided with the source of LuaJava to make a 64-bit version, but I had no luck. I then realized that the problem was in fact the JRE version I was using being 64-bit. I had the 32-bit version on my computer but was not using, for some reason, so I switched the project over to using the 32-bit JRE and now it's all good.

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 #008

It's been a while... let's just leave it at that. Quite a bit has changed for Heart Realm since I've posted last; a change of location for one (in real life), change of job (had one, now I don't and I'm looking). Personal stuff aside, I've been working on this game on and off for the past few months so there's been a bit of change since I've last posted.

One major new thing is the inventory menu, it's very simple at the moment and don't want to go too complex with it at the moment.

Heart Realm Update #007

It's been a while since I've posted an update. First off, I started working on a board game version of one of my other games at the beginning of June. Then in June I started a second job so I was working two jobs and figured it'd better to spend my time developing a board game in the little amount free time I had so I continued doing that for a little while. Last week was when I finished working at my previous job so now I'm just working one job and so I have more free time to develop. Since I have more free time I continued working on Heart Realm.

For the past week or so I worked on a few things. For starters I worked on line-of-sight based vision where it basically just blacks out anything outside the player's line of sight where objects can block the sight. Currently it's in an early stage so the game does take a little bit of a performance hit. The game doesn't run really slow or anything, but there's definitely a big difference in performance with it compared to without it.

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.

Heart Realm Update #004

This past week's focus has been on getting weapons into the game. Like the previous update where I focused on importing armor items into the game, I did the same this week but with weapons. Weapons were a little different in that I also had to come up with a way to import animations and store them in memory while the game was running.

So far I've got a data set of armor, weapons, and animations as far as content that I've loaded via XML files and stored for easy access during run-time. Like the armor, I also had an overlay on the player's sprite for the weapon. Unlike the armor, the weapon overlay also animates with the body, while the armor overlays are just a single frame, though that may change as I introduce more animations for the player. Other than that weapon importing wasn't too bad as I had the armor importing as reference so not too much extra work.

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.

Heart Realm Day 01

While this may say Day 1, it's technically Day 3 or 4 of development. I started writing down the concept of the game the other day, but didn't actually start programming or anything until today. So, the game, as of right now, is called Heart Realm as you'll start off in this single hub type place and be transported to other various locations and dungeons which will primarily being procedurally-generated as most Rogue-Like games do. I decided to go with the name "Heart Realm" because you will always have this central hub-type realm you visit for shops and whatnot and can transport yourself to various locations via portals or whatever. I'm not 100% sure of all the details of the game. As far as the character goes, I'm also not entirely sure what I want to do, but from what I've decided so far is that you will play a generic player character which as you proceed through the game will evolve in whatever way you may see fit through the equipment, attributes, and spells you build into this character.