The pipeline for dialog to the game

So we're getting in some semblance of dialog for our next big playtest on Monday.

Robby and I worked together to come up with a system for storing the first type of dialog called comments.

Comments are simple forms of dialog that only involve one character (as opposed to conversations which involve multiple characters).

Comments come in two types. The first are idle comments. Idle comments are going to have a chance to trigger at any time. The second type is triggered comments. Triggered comments have a chance occuring after their trigger condition is met.

Some example trigger conditions are BasicAttackHit and SpellCastRank1.

Now to actual handle this I'm creating an XML reader that will parse through xml documents and store the comments internally. Robby and I spent some time this afternoon coming up with the correct structure and making sure we were both on the same page. Robby will be able to directly edit the xml rather than having to go searching through other files and this will streamline our dialog pipeline.

(Belated) First Prototype Playtesting Results

Just realized that we never made a post about our very first playtest! We've been pretty ambitious about the stuff we want to include in our game, so everyone's been really focused on working rather than typing up fancy word-posts. That's the excuse we're going with, at least.

Anyway, we had our first playtest a couple weeks ago, and we got a lot of valuable feedback. A lot of it was what we expected, but that was still valuable in reinforcing our internal playtesting. 

Spring Break Crunch!

Contrary to the lack of blog posts recently, we've been working hard toward our next major milestone. Our "Three Floor Demo" is due for testing on March 10th, and we're well on our way to making it happen. 

As we're all a bunch of nerds with no Spring break plans, we're working extra hard this week to meet all our goals for the demo. This, of course, excluded Evan and Julia, as they go to schools that for some reason decide to have their Spring breaks during the actual Spring time (weird, right?). This doesn't mean that they aren't working hard; just that we get to make them feel bad by working extra hours because we have nothing better to do.

Anyway, here are this week's goals for finishing up our next big demo:

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!