Not going to get finished for the end of the month, but want to have something cool to show. I’m starting to add comments to the code such as //Hack //Fixme and //Suboptimal

I’ve kinda sorta got some gameplay now – There can be multiple enemies and they each take turns. I thought that just attacking on 4 directions was a bit limiting for both gameplay and strategy so I’ve also started to code some ‘targeting’ for spells and ranged attacks – Even though there are currently no spells or ranged attacks. You can see the targets in the screenshot, yes I know they look like lollipops but it’s all I need for now.

Mouse clicking into 3D space has been the bane of my existence ever since I started coding video games, but at least XNA has a Viewport.Project() method for turning 3d co-ordinates into 2d screen space. You still have to be careful with any scaling you might have.

Mostly been under to hood updates the last couple of days. The enemies can now animate, there is a state machine for menus and things, the UI classes have been fleshed out a little more, I also darkened the edges of the viewport (I was somewhat inspired by the instagram filters, they have a tendancy to make things look creepy – It needs a real artist to work on, but the concept is neat.)

There still is no gameplay, got to add the ability for the player to die and get the enemies moving around.

Not much to report. Except, oh wait what’s this?

At this rate I’m not going to get a game done…

Spent the last two evenings creating some geometry, skirting boards and support posts for the walls. Which allow the geometry to pop-out from the walls a little. It’s subtle but it adds lot to improving the dungeon environment. What I actually need is to import some 3d models for the walls. (My current method had me ploting the points and uv mapping in code – WHICH SUCKS!) Oh well, I know how to improve it now. I have next week off work, so I should be able to get a good amount of work done on the game. I could probably spend a month alone just working on generating the dungeon. Never mind the game!

Spent some time this weekend socializing, so I didn’t get as much gameplay stuff done as I wanted to. You can now see some better placeholder textures and I got the enemies bill boarding and choosing the correct texture for rotations. This took much longer than I thought it would (About 4 hours) – It’s amazing how much about trig, vectors and rotations you can forget if you don’t use it for 9+ months.

This week will be devoted to getting the enemies to move and attack and die. If I have some spare time I’ll work on some prettiness.

Added since last post: Walls, player is rendered on the mini-map, started on AI Manager

Starting a 30 day game without an established engine is a bit, rather, err… foolish. In the screenshot above you can see my first enemy, but it took a lot to get him on the screen and he doesn’t actually do anything, no animations, no movement, nothing – That’s because I don’t have an engine, I’m building one at the same time as building the game. (XNA is just a framework, not a game engine.)

Monday was a public holiday for us in the commonwealth, but tomorrow I’m back at work – so you probably won’t see any updates until next weekend. That’s ok, ’cause I have to do some tidy up with the code and do boring (but fun for me!) things like create ResourceManagers and Pool<T> and Billboard and AnimatedSprite classes.

June is (Inter)national Game Development Month. (http://nagademo.com/) And I decided to participate. This meant putting other projects on hold. I also have a full time job, so my time spent on this project is limited to weekends and evenings.

I am making a First Person Roguelike – A sort of Caverns of Underkeep 3D if you will.

The screenshot above shows the first full day’s(and a bit) worth of progress. I was a bit hampered by trying to remember how 3D worked (I’m using XNA) getting vectors around the wrong way confused my poor brain. But I have a basic first person camera and collision detection.

I want the game to be turn based but play rather fast, basically your options are attack, move, use item or cast spell. (Turning 90 degrees is free) – I was inspired by the Wolfenstein and Doom RPG games. I also manageed to find a copy of Orcs and Elves for Nintendo DS to research.

The goal is to get a very workable prototype of a game done by the end of the month. When it is all over I’ll decide if I want to turn it into a complete polished game.

Next up, building the walls. Importing some monsters, creating some random dungeons.