Dogboy Studios

I sense a disturbance in the force

Quick note to say that the project is not dead. Other priorities are taking precedence right now. Rest assured we will return when the time is available.

If anyone has downloaded the tools and has questions or something they want to share drop me a note.

While happily creating a world map today I discovered a client bug that would have been most annoying later.

The client needs to keep track of all the possible things in the game that might need to be shown. This allows us to drop a sword on the ground and see an image of the sword.

I had written the client code to look in the application support folder for all the thing files since that is where the server keeps them. This works great…. until you don’t have the server running on your machine. Since I figure 99.98% of the players will not be running the server they would not be able to see the images of things in the game. This would definitely take some of the ‘graphical’ out of graphical mud.

The client already has copies of all these things as they are compiled into the package when the client is built. So I needed to do some quick cleanup to make the client look in its own bundle rather than the support folders.

In the end this only took about a half hour to fix and I think the code is actually cleaner now as a super added bonus.

Will try to be on the watch for this going forward. Not easy to keep track of a project with at least four separate executables at any one time.

Taking a few weeks off from coding is a double edged sword in this instance. Since the code was looking nice and fresh I quickly spotted the problem but I wasn’t sure my hunch was right that the code was wrong. I thought perhaps I did this for a reason. It took about 15 minutes to determine this would never work.

Well at least I got a bit of the world done today….

It has been a while since I have been able to do meaningful work on Dark Chaos. Finally got a chance to work on the tools and the world for the alpha test today.

The tools were updated with some minor fixes and should be available for download soon on DarkChaos.com. Feel free to give them a try. We need help making a living breathing world so jump in and give it a try. The map editor is significantly upgraded from the old download.

When the downloads are up you will be able to grab the map editor and the ‘thing’ editor. Start with the thing editor to create weapons, armor and enemies. If your enemies or shop keepers will need items you need to create them first in the thing editor then add them to the mob or shopkeeper.

Once you have some stuff you can make a map and place your things on the map. If you need help drop me a note on the forums over at Dark Chaos

For both of these tools you will need bitmaps. The basic tile size for Dark Chaos is 32×32. We support multiple map levels and transparency. Use google to find existing images or create your own. The 32×32 format is used by several other game engines and there are lots of resources out there. Try a search for ‘RPG Maker chipset’ for starters.

Excuse the rough edges on the tools. They were not really designed for use by the masses so there are some ugly interface things and rough edges. Suggestions for improvement are always welcome but I would prefer to concentrate on the game server and client so I may put tools suggestions at the back of the list.

All the tools require OS X 10.5.

In game related work, I have completed the basic armor, weapons, shopkeepers and enemies for the alpha test. I now need to put a map or three together and we are good to go. It is not as easy as it sounds. Even with the map maker, laying little tiles down to make a compelling world is hard work and requires a bit of thought.

Hang in there there is really a game coming.

Thanks to those who have been in touch with us so far. The support is a big help with motivation when it comes to working on some of this boring stuff.

Still banging away on creating a world for alpha testing. Trying to resist adding new features. It is very tempting to code up all sorts of new ideas but logic says its best to make sure what we have already is working.

I did make some changes to the tools that make it much easier to create things. That had to be done.

Hopefully have something for play-testing shortly. (where shortly means in a week or so give or take a week or so.)

I have started working on a small world to use for the alpha test. Even a small world requires a lot of work to create mobs, items, towns, shops, etc, etc.

Our graphics engine is set to use 32 x 32 pixel tiles. This is a format that many other game engines use and there are lots of freely available tiles to use. This was a big factor when I started because I didn’t want to get bogged down creating artwork for the game. I want to focus on programming not art. If I wanted to get involved with that I would have done a 3D game.

The problem is some of the tile sets I am finding are lacking items. My current dilemma is pants. I can’t find a decent image of pants or any other leg armor. There are several sets of graphics that I am using originally designed for rouguelike games but who knew that no one wears pants in rougelike games?!?

I am not going to let this stop progress. I will just put any old placeholder graphic for leggings now and get back to it later. If anyone wants to help with graphics drop me a note.

All the features I want to have ready for alpha testing are done.

I worked to get armor working this weekend and tweaked a lot of existing things. Right now armor only affects armor class. There are no magic buffs or any special features yet. At least they will protect you from giant rats a little better than nothing.

I wasn’t happy with the client layout so I tore it apart and shuffled the components around. I am still not totally satisfied with it but it works now and is better than what we had. I will hold off remodeling for a while until more elements are added to the client.

There are many more features to work on but I think a test is in order to see how the server holds up. This will also let met track down any bugs. I am curious where others think the next steps should be so I will look for input as to what features are most important to implement next.

So I will just flip the switch and let everyone play, right? Not that simple. The current map I use for testing is just a barren wasteland with about 4 types of mobs, a shopkeeper and a cemetery. It isn’t any fun. There are also only about 6 weapons and our armory holds but a simple cloak. There is lots of work to do to build a simple world for testing. It needs to be somewhat entertaining as it is a game after all.

Luckily the tools are in good shape so producing all this content is not too bad. There are some adjustments I want to make in the tools so creating content is a good exercise.

I’m sure there will be more work before we open the doors for testing but I don’t expect it to be too long now.

We have shopkeepers.

I added shopkeepers tonight. They will respond to 4 commands. Buy, Sell, List and Appraise. For the testing stages I will leave this pretty simple but I will eventually add more economic features.

In the future shopkeepers will not pay for items they already have a surplus of and will pay premiums for new items.

You can also drop and pick up items from the map. Seems simple but without these commands inventory management was a bit incomplete.

I think this will just about bring us to alpha level. There is a basic RPG here but it will need lots of adjusting and adding of features before it approaches what I want to accomplish.

So far so good…

Tonight’s task was to get looting working.

I first added the ability to place items in mobs inventories. This was a pretty easy effort requiring adding some interface elements to the Thing Editor. You can place any valid thing in a mobs inventory.

Next I had to notify the player that items are available when a mob is killed. I do this in two ways. As soon as the mob is killed you are awarded your experience and then told what loot is on the corpse. This also includes any copper pieces (our money.)

The other way you can see what items are in a corpse are to stand on the corpse and the text field that shows the description for your location will tell you there is a corpse and what is in it, if anything.

Once you are standing on a corpse you can loot both the copper and any items. You need to have adequate room in your inventory and I will eventually add weight and size checks.

I am contemplating making this a bit more random. I think there needs to be a chance that loot is destroyed or simply isn’t found on each corpse. I will need to come up with a clever way of doing this without storing loot tables in the mobs themselves. I don’t want to get into that level of detail right now.

I think this just about completes the items I originally outlined as needed for what I would consider an alpha level game. The last piece of the puzzle would be buying and selling loot.

At that point we would have the following features:

• Character creation with custom skills, stats, race and class
• Combat
• Multiple maps that link to each other
• Unlimited mobs that move around the map
• Experience is gained for successful combat
• Experience is lost for death
• You can advance levels and gain additional stats
• You can gain loot from combat
• *You can sell excess loot
• *You can buy new things to enhance your character

Only the last two remain incomplete right now.

Yes, there is a ton more work but a project like this is never done.

We will need to add a magic system, crafting, more skills, more items, more mobs, more maps. The system needs a lot of balance and polish. I am also not naive enough to think there aren’t a lot of bugs that will need fixing.

Still I feel good about the progress I have made thus far. A real multiplayer game with assorted tools for creation of game assets is a pretty big task for about two months work.

A bit tired tonight so not too much work done.

The sounds were annoying me since they were too loud. So if you were listening to iTunes or in an iChat session the game sounds would jump right in.

So tonight I added volume control to the sound effects. As always with Cocoa it takes one line to change the volume, a handful more to expose the volume control to the user via an NSSlider and then *poof* it works.