『dungeon b2』devlog 5/31/18

hey folks!! time for a devlog!!! lets dive in!!!

so, when we last left off, i was making a fake launcher for the fake mmo within dungeon b2. that was p much done, so this past week i've been hard at work on some of the actual game parts.

please calm yourself, kafra...

first up was redoing the movement! when i first started this project, i was toying with the idea of doing click-to-move, like RO and many other free mmos at the time were using. however... click-to-move isn't very fun! and while this game is meant to evoke some of the same mechanics that those classic mmos used, i kinda only wanna take the stuff that was actually fun. and... my primary game design tenet is "if your playable character isn't fun to just move around with, You Messed Up." so! i threw out the ol' click-to-move and moved to direct character control. i'm currently designing everything around gamepad, but i'm keeping keyboard movement+mouse ui navigation in mind as well and that'll be implemented once my inputs are a lil more set in stone!

nose cube's adventure

i went back to basic gfx for a lil bit here while figuring out movement and targeting. these are the two things you'll be doing most so it's important to tackle em first. the goal for targeting is for the player to not have to think too hard about how to target the thing they intend to target. so, i have a messy lil system in place where it prioritizes potential targets in front of you, with things flagged as monsters as top priority. then the nose cube shoots a beam at that target to see if it's blocked by anything. if not, then you've got yourself a target! if there's no targets in front, it'll select from a smaller radius around you, but not too far directly behind you. for instance, if a monster walks up behind you and there's nothing in front of you and you hit the target button, chances are what you're intending to do is target the thing that's attacking you, even if you didn't think to turn around and face it first. i've been tweaking it around those kinds of expectations and shall continue to do so probably until the end of development. havin a lot of experience with mmos has actually helped me here, ahaha.

welcome back, ladies

and our kafra gals have returned! i implemented a few more targeting tweaks, like being able to cycle through all surrounding targets clockwise/counterclockwise using dpad left/right. i'm nooot pleased with how this system works right now - it literally just spins a ray around from the player in a full circle from the current target position (or from player facing if no target), so you get unintuitive instances like, when you have the bottom right NPC selected here, you have to press right on the dpad to select the NPC in the bottom left. (since it's next in clockwise order) i'll definitely scrap this for something more intuitive later on, but for now it'll do!

the kafra corporation can be a very competitive workplace

next is the seeds of combat!! once you've got a valid monster target, pressing attack again will start autoattack. there's currently no feedback of any kind for this, which i'll address toward the end of the post, but... basically the way it works is you have an aspd value in your stats that determines the time between attacks, and when that ticks down to 0 and you're within range of your target you let loose a blow, resetting the delay back to full. the counter starts ticking down as soon as you initiate combat and continues to tick down even if you move away from your target, and as soon as you're back in range your attack will come out. autoattacks were really fun in RO, with a lot of focus on optimizing your autoattack damage by way of crits, attack speed, defense penetration, and autocast procs. the characters in the scope of dungeon b2 are probably only about level 25-30 (out of a theoretical 99) though, so i'll only really get to express a tiny bit of that here! WHICH IS PROBABLY FOR THE BEST,

choose wisely

names and better targeting reticle animations! i've still got some kinks to work out with projecting stuff like names and combat damage over objects in 3d space - they don't currently take things like camera pan or zoom level into account, so you end up with bad situations like this with name labels floating over the very center of targets and comically tiny damage numbers.

this sucks.

as i get a lil further into dev, i'm considering abandoning the current system of using Actual unity sprites in favor of screen-facing quads with sprite materials on em. i feel like that might afford me more resources when it comes to things like positioning ui bits... also it'd let me do stuff like explode sprites into ps1 triangles, which is a big charm point for me,

love to use my desk top

i linked up the fake launcher and game, and got the game's camera contained in a fake window! you can't do it in the demo yet, but i actually have it set up so that if the window moves, the game camera does as well. so eventually you'll be able to move the game window around the fake desktop, which doesnt really serve any purpose other than that it feels like you should be able to do it!!!

you might also notice i put some real basic button ui in here! nothin too interesting there. spells/skills will be on their own hotkeys eventually, but for now heal's on the left face button since it's the only one.

powerful incantation

speaking of skills/spells, it was time to implement one of those! a heal spell's a pretty basic concept, so i did that one first. casting a spell references a spell table w things like effect, cast time, sp cost, spell power, spell requirements etc and makes a spell come out. if you don't have anything targeted and you cast a targetable beneficial spell, you'll automatically cast it on yourself! around this point i also made it possible to target yourself by pressing up/down on the dpad. eventually, this will allow you to cycle through all your party members, including yourself! this is a feature straight out of ffxiv's gamepad controls that i absolutely adore as a support player.

there's no point to it, but i put a tiny platforming challenge in this build??? its fine

i think that's it!!! that brings us to The Present. so, what's next?

no more of this please

- read stats from spreadsheet! not super interesting but currently, stuff like monster/pc/npc stats are all hardcoded in the unity editor! i wanna make it so i can write all that junk in a spreadsheet and just reference an entity id in-engine and have it all autofill instead. 

some of these

- emotes! the main way you interact with other "players" in the gameworld outside of the vn segments (which only pop up while sitting to recover hp/sp) is through emotes. other players will respond to these with their own emotes and they'll have a positive/negative impact on your relationships and allow you to request help, etc. also they are cute

the wheel've fate it's turning

- more ui stuff! there's currently Basically Nothing. i have an idea for representing your autoattack delay (the above circle-at-your-feet filling up thing), and i need to get things like enemy hp/sp, player hp/sp, and a stats menu all worked out. i quite like doing ui stuff these days so i'm excited about this one!!!!

AND that's probably all the stuff i'll get to work on next week??? i focused pretty hard on dungeon b2 this past week to play catch-up, but next week i gotta get back to workin on my primary project as well! i'll still get to work on b2 of course, just not All Day Most Of The Days Of The Week.

here's some stuff i couldnt figure out where to put.

i spent way too long on these guys......... meet "Cuber" and "Roast Cuber"

i did this as a test to see if RO's art style was a pain in the neck to imitate. the answer: Yes

ok!! hope that was interesting!!! that's all i got for now!!!! see you next time!!!!!

edit: oh right, patreon blows images up to fill the entire width of the post. oh well i dont want to fix it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! sORRY