Just a quick post for Screenshot Saturday. Working on getting a first pass of art in the game and hopefully have something to show by GDC time. I'm still figuring out the whole work flow with Spine, and also high res assets. For now it's looking like Flash is my best bet, at least for particles, but for other frame by frame stuff I'm still not sure what I'm going to do to achieve the look that Photoshop gives me...

I'll save those details for a future blog post though!

I'm spending this week at the lovely Indie House in Vancouver, Canada! Since I was coming up to Seattle for Steam Dev Days I figured it was a good opportunity to just hop on a bus and spend some time with my best Canadian pals.

The past couple of days I've been banging my head against a wall trying to come up with some kind of RPG inspired system for the game tentatively titled Gaiaden. One of my goals for the game is to have a robust system of equipment, weapons, enchantments, and all that kinda stuff for the player to experiment with. I've never really created anything like this before so all of this stuff is completely new territory for me.

I thought a good place to start would be to check out roguelikes since they are games usually all about systems of items, equipment, spells, and more. I searched around for some open source ones and managed to find Amaranth. Although the source of this game is super clean, it was pretty hard for me to follow.

I also tried looking up just some general purpose roguelike development tutorials for using items, equipment, and all that kinda stuff. I read through a couple like this one and this one but they weren't really digging deep enough to get to the part I was really curious about. I want a system in which "Enchantments" can trigger, and then have an effect on something in the game, and I couldn't find any resources to help me understand how to build such a system.

I put out a call for help on Twitter and got help from a lot of developers, and I'm constantly amazed at how awesome the game making community is. Special thanks to all of you who helped me out via Skype and Twitter! You are the very best.

After some late night chats with developers who've been through this scenario before, it seems like I have to go down the route of using a bunch of events in order to trigger any enchantments that are on the player. The idea is that equipment in the game can have enchantments which could have simple to complex conditions, and effects. I want to ultimately be able to generate equipment and enchantments on the fly... and it turns out this is pretty tough to figure out.

I have a basic system working now, but the way I do it right now is to loop through all the available enchantments on the player and have them call a CheckTrigger() function. That function also takes in a struct called TriggerInfo, which will eventually contain a boatload of info about the current game state. I might scrap this and go for a pure event based system, but I worry about over using events and not being able to follow the code if everything gets totally decoupled. The TriggerInfo method works great currently, but I have a feeling once I try to trigger enchantments based off of things like "the player just built an island" or "the player just took damage" it'll become a pain to register that with TriggerInfo on the update function.

So that's where I'm at now, just churning away at this system to eventually enable the player to get some cool stuff set up.