So we've got our chosen 9

The 9 playable characters for the games have just been finished skill and stat wise. We've still got a lot of work to do with the art side, but we'll be giving some sneak peaks on some of the characters in future posts.

Stuff like art, their techniques, their combat style, and their back story will be shown.

The Daunting Dialogue System, Part 2: Event Dialogue & Idle Dialogue

Time for round two! This continues where the first post left off, discussing the design for the dialogue system in Lifelike.

This second half discusses the two different large categories of dialogue: Event Dialogue and Idle Dialogue.

The Daunting Dialogue System, Part 1: Overview & Priority

So, I've finally finished the design document for Lifelike's dialogue system. Funny how a single bullet point ("Integrated, un-intrusive dialogue") can turn into about nine pages of specifications. The design for this definitely turned out to be more complicated than expected. The complexity is mainly caused by the fact that, while our core gameplay is turn-based, the dialogue is real-time.

Because of this, it's possible for dialogue to be triggered while other dialogue is already going on. Find the solution to this problem (and more!) in the first half of the Dialogue System Design Document, after the break.

Sprint #3

A little late, but it's here! The moment you've all been waiting for! SPRINT THREEEEEEE!

This week is a little different as we're splitting it up. We're playtesting a prototype on Thursday, so we've organized the week's tasks with that in mind.

Check out this week's goals after the break.

Particles, Tiles, Skills, Art

 Highlights of this week's sprint:

• Reworked our tile system to incorporate particles effects, so we can get a lot more creative with our tile visuals. Most of the current tile colors and effects will be redone.
• Implemented the Knuckleduster skill which can knock enemies into an object and take bonus damage.
• Created a Z-depth system that allows any object, including particle effects, to properly align behind and in front of other objects.
• The targeting and movement mechanics have had some improvements.
• Implemented the AI for the enemy "Manager".
• Improvements to the HUD, right clicking to cancel an attack, or resume movement if you haven't moved.
• Heroes can now gain experience by killing and assisting on a kill, eventually leveling up.
• Created a level up particle animation, shown at the start of the video and after defeating the drones.
• Hit/Miss/Damage formulas have been added to the skills/attacks.
• Added art that has been completed so far; several office props and two character sprites.

Sprint 2

This post is a little late (as our Sprint started on Monday!), but here are the details for this week's sprint goals:

Full Steam Ahead!

We accomplished this week's programming milestone tasks and some extra.

I implemented a basic Skill system, which I then scrapped and redid from scratch.
The new system actually implements Basic Attacks, Skills and Weapon Skills. So not only is everything abstracted from one class, but each "Skill" requires it's own personal script, which can be fully customized to suit our needs.
In other words, I made a skill system that completes the backbone of our combat system as a whole. All that's missing is content, and stat formulas.

Also did a lot of improvements on path finding (turns out it still had a few edge cases - bugs)

Implemented two of the three skills that were designed this week, up to rank 1, adding additional ranks will be trivial.

The first enemy AI for the Drones is complete, they will chase the closest player and attack if possible.

We added camera movement, which also has some smoothing to give it a nice feel.

Added a basic framework for object interation.

Cleaned up a lot of old archaic code and log messages.

And lots of bug fixing!

Desks and Chairs and Coolers oh my!

And now for our regularly scheduled art injection:

This week I made some of the initial art assets for the first boring normal floor! How monotonous can we get?

But what's not monotonous is character concept art!! We have our lovely main character, "The Intern," who turned quite sassy so far. And "The Blogger," who is contemplating the meaning of life with a netbook monitor as a face.

The Intern

The Blogger 

(He's in a strange in between place right now, between sketch and finished, but it's OK we all go through that at some point in our lives...)

Corruption Guidelines

So, as we've mentioned quite a bit, our game focuses around a transition from a realistic setting to a surreal fantasy setting. That's pretty much the extent of the detail we've shared about it, and that's not because we were being secretive... it's because we didn't know.

With nothing more than an ambiguous idea about normal things being slowly replaced by very not normal things, it became clear that we needed more clarity in order to move forward with art and design.

As such, I decided to write up a guidelines document, detailing what we want to do with our weird, eclectic inspirations.

an early corruption comparison sketch

So, here's the doc (after the break):

Spreadsheet Boogie

So I've been working on some of the underlying stats for Lifelike like creating the character stats and the damage formula.

I've just finished the first iteration of stats for three characters and boy was it a lot of numbers to attempt to balance. I'm sure these numbers will be fluctuating as we progress through development and can really test combat scenarios, but each character has around fifty numbers to actually manage.

I'll be taking a second swing at the damage formula tonight since I wasn't really happy with how it turned out last night, afterwards I've got some item design to do and I'm gonna spend some time helping Kiril with the programming side.

On a side note this is the most I've used Excel/Google Spreadsheets in my life.

Paul