Examining Combat And Loot Drops

My most recent upload fixes camera issues that cropped up as a result of allowing the player to zoom out, and filled in some tile zones that became visible as a result of that change. I had also found a spot where the player could get stuck while going around a corner, which seemed to be a bug in the navigation system that I had to work around by reshaping my navigation area and re-baking it until it went away.

My next update will hopefully feature loot drops and some basic combat that is more involved than having my enemy die if you hit it once. I'm also hoping to add in some basic enemy attacks and movement, so that they begin to seem more formidable than a target dummy with animations.

The primary rule during prototyping is to not create any art assets if you can avoid it, because you need to spend your time building systems and core game play instead to prove that your game will actually be fun to play before you actually begin to make it look like the game you envisioned. However, I couldn't really find any free assets that would stand in for my loot, perhaps because I'm being picky about it, so I fired up Inkscape and made some. Keep in mind that none of the art in the game currently is likely to be in the final game at launch time.

The basic prototype idea is build a so called "vertical slice" that represents the important game play elements so that people can actually playtest it and give feedback about what they like or dislike about the experience. The art isn't important for that, which is why we just grab free art assets and slap it together, and then test often so that we can debug and tweak the game play mechanics. It's not meant to look amazing... yet. You could even argue that bothering to use art assets instead of boxes or cubes is above and beyond the call of duty for a prototype.

Prototypes aren't really meant to have any story yet, either. Obviously a final game needs a story, unless it's something like Pong, which not only didn't need any story, but would be utterly stupid if you tried to actually add a story to it. Story matters, but it's probably better to save that bit for the demo and launch versions of the game.

Prototypes don't need a name, either. Although a catchy name might put a grin on your face, it won't make it any more or less fun to actually play, and that's the crucial bit that we're exploring when we make a game prototype.

My current prototype is loaded up with a mix of pixel art and custom pieces that I made as vector art. It's fairly inconsistent, but the actual goal is to make a high resolution 2D game with crisp graphics, full of highly saturated colors and lots of high tech neon, almost none of which is here now, because it doesn't need to be here yet. I did spend some time making vegetation behave in a natural way, because I consider that an actual system that's being developed for the final game.

It's not really important to communicate my ultimate vision here, because as I said, that won't actually make it fun if the core game play sucks, but I do want to tease a little.

Some days I make large leaps forward, by adding important features, and other days I make a series of very small tweaks or discover and kill off bugs. Some days I end up making new bugs for myself by changing things, and then I have to decide if I want to kill the new bugs or just roll things back to before I broke it. Version control is massively important here. I can get really experimental in a new branch, and if it doesn't pan out, it never gets merged back into my main branch.

Today I made artwork for my loot drops, and I scribbled down some thoughts about how I'd go about deciding when to drop loot, how much to drop, and where it would fall to the ground when the enemy dies. I didn't write a single line of code to make it happen, yet. Some days are like that. I need to feel it before I put fingers to the keyboard. I did add a bit to my HUD to show how much loot had been hoovered up so far by the player, although there's no code to actually increment it yet, so it just says "0" for now, and there's no code to actually collect it yet, because there's no code to actually make it drop yet.

I like the idea of coding loot before I make some decent combat. It's easier to test if I can run up, whack something, and see if it drops any loot when it dies from a single hit, without worrying about it fighting back... yet. All things come, in time.

Feedback is always welcome. Currently about the only thing that's working enough are the movement controls, so we can focus on feedback/suggestions for that part right now. Let me know what works, what doesn't work, and what you'd hope to see eventually for controls.