Tiny Frog Software

This month I was far more productive with my still-not-named episodic RPG project – Using two monitors makes life so much nicer.

This month also marks a special occasion as I’ve now been working on the project in my spare time for one whole year now.

Time sure flies..

This month I’ve added features for NPCs to the map/world editor and spent a little time working on the datastructure for NPC dialog trees. The thing with dialog trees is that they’re not actually trees – But rather directed graphs. When you think of modeling conversations as a series of nodes which represent the state the conversation is in and a set of response options which represent a transition function to another state in the conversation, it’s actually quite simple.

I’ll be using lua scripts for the dialogs, that way I can easily add conditional responses – For example you wouldn’t want to accuse someone of murder unless you had gathered enough evidence to support the claim.

Also I’ve decided on doing a ‘pilot episode’ which will probably be a 3-4 hour long game to test the engine and actually produce a finished product before the turn of the century. I’ve sketched out some details for a side-story which will take place in the same world as the other episodes, but will involve a different protagonist.

See you next month.

Its not quite the end of the month, but it’s close enough to write my monthly review on the rQuest project.

Work this month was slow as I’m starting to pick up other (non-computer or only semi-computer related) projects / hobbies to do in the evenings.

Programming a video game after spending 8 hours a day programming line of business applications can be a little hard on the brain, eyes and body. Getting exercise and spending time away from the computer to degauss in the evenings can be really satisfying. Realistically I can only commit approx 8 hours per week for rQuest, but thats ok – as it’s a non-zero amount and it’s surprising what you can acomplish in an on-the-ball-ready-and-focused 8 hours.

This month I created the CRUD to add items to the project – For all your wands and shields and swords of much smiting +12 against trolls.

Screenshot Below

This was actually one of the more boring tasks to do as it is stupidly similar to what most database front-end working programmers do day in and day out – Someone has a product and it has these data fields which mean stuff and an end-user needs to enter new products and edit existing products etc…

Basically if I was running a medieval shop (or is that shoppe?) this months work would have been scarily similar to the functional specification of that shop.

I also did a little bit of story development. So the ’soft’ areas of the game, if still neglected haven’t exactly been forgotten about.

As I have worked on the game editor it has become pretty obvious that I need to get another monitor – Often I need to run two IDEs (Visual Studio for C#, CodeBlocks for C++) with perhaps a paint program, or an Internet browser open. (Three monitors would be cooler, but my budget doesn’t extend that far just yet.) It’s almost an exercise in inefficiency to keep developing on only a single monitor.

So next month it’s dual monitors!

March was a pretty slow month for me.

Most work this month was spent re-organising the level editor, which is slowly transitioning into a complete game editor.

Instead of creating maps, you now create a project – Which contains multiple maps and each project has its own data for monsters, npcs, scripts and tilesets. This is largely a bi-product of deciding to go episodic, but it also centralises much of the workflow involved in creating a game.

This process will take a while as it’s much more complicated to write an application that manages n things when you only originally planned to handle one thing.

So work this month will probably continue to improve on the game editor. But I should really get around to getting the C++ game engine UI stuff implemented sometime.

Also, does anyone know of a (Preferably Cheap) syntax highlighting edit box for .Net? – I want to add the ability to edit LUA scripts into the game editor and would like to have some syntax highlighting.

The other question I was pondering with respect to my Indie RPG was how to deal with maps.

I thought that implementing an Ultima7 style continuously scrolling seamless map would be cool as there are not many tile-based RPGs that do that sort of thing. I even sketched out an algorithm that was based on a tree that would grow and store neighbouring maps in memory in order to stitch them together at render time, and I’m pretty confidant it would work quite well.

However, I’m not going to do it.

And the reason for that is because I’ve been thinking about the story line and other aspects of my game and it’s now going to be delivered in a series of episodes!

Having a seamless map kind of makes sense if you are planning a huge world, but as each episode is going to be its own game having the traditional style go to the edge of the map and load a new area makes more sense.

Delivering a series of episodes means smaller development cycles and a tighter focus per game. I think I’d rather play shorter games as I mentioned in Too Many Games to Play

Now that I’m done thinking about things, I can go forth and actually start producing some real work!

So a little over a week ago I posted about two fairly important decisions I had to make about my Indie RPG and after pontificating over a couple of hundreds of dozens of cups of tea, I’ve reached my decisions.

Decision One : The Resolution

Will be 1024×768 or 1024×700 in windowed mode – The extra 68 pixels in fullscreen mode will contain a little border graphic, the reason for a difference between windowed and full screen is because if you are playing on a laptop like mine and you only have 800 vertical pixels to play with and approx 80 of those are taken up by the taskbar and the application window, in order to fit the game on the screen, you have to cull some pixels.

This means that the game will look large enough to be played in windowed mode, so people won’t feel the need to go to full screen to get a more immersive experience and my old school pixel art won’t look all blurry when the game is played at non-native resolutions. Of course, if you were really old school you’d have a CRT monitor anyhow.

I may also offer a widescreen mode down the line, but I’m not promising anything at the moment.

1024×768 also allows me to have larger, easier to read text on the screen which is good for older more experienced people

The tilesize is going to remain at 32×32 at least for now. I’m going to make use of some stock art assets found around the internet and in the RPG Maker community for now so I can begin to piece togeather the game without having to fork up heaps for custom art assests straight away.