Walk animation, cast animation and ice particle effect

I did some long-needed pixel artwork. A walk animation for the player-character, a casting pose and the missing particle effect for cold attacks.

Wenibe and Angel quest finished

I reworked Wenibe and finished the angel quest. I actually did two weeks ago. I need to take this blogging thing more serious again.

Little content todo list

I am currently working on content up to level 10. I made the dungeon which should bring the player to level 10, but it is still quite hardcore. Here is a little Todo list of stuff I need to add to prepare the player for it:

• Give the healer more healing spells for sale
• Quest to introduce the player to item crafting
• Add a level 5 soft crafting material so the player can craft hats and robes before visiting the dungeon
• Draw the container for the MacGuffin #1 and add it to the dungeon
• Add more staffs (and write the code for making staffs do what they are supposed to be doing)

Labyrinth generator

I experimented with procedural map generation. The maze below is created completely on the server based on a random seed. I might want to use this algorithm as-is in the finished game to create procedural dungeons, but for now it's mainly a proof-of-concept. I could imagine a lot more kinds of maps which could be created procedurally than just this one.

This, however, begs the question of how much I want to rely on procedural content. While procedural generation is a great way to create huge amounts of content with minimal work, it can never compete with the ingenuity of hand-designed content.

To send the procedurally-generated map to the client, I had to write my own encoding routine for my maps. I used to just forward the original JSON code from Tiled to the client. But because there is no Tiled file for procedurally-generated maps, I had to write a routine to encode the map data myself.

The same routine is now used for the maps made in Tiled. This has the advantage that I only transfer the information about the map which the client needs to know. This saves bandwidth and removes cheating opportunities.

Content Content Content!

The last days were all about adding content. I made the first complete quest, I made the biggest map so far, I balanced the existing mobs and I made a new tileset which I will soon use for the first real dungeon. But there is still a lot of stuff to do before I got enough content to go public.

Barrier Tutorial

I added a barrier tutorial to the tutorial map.

The player has to walk through a course without taking any non-shield damage.

This required two new scripting abilities: Map areas which trigger scripts and attacks which trigger scripts. Both of these new abilities will likely come in handy in the future.

Yay, vacation!

I got two weeks of vacation, so I finally got some time and energy for my programming project.

In the past days I fixed some small bugs (the bad news: while I did that I discovered lots of new bugs). I also made some more particle effects.

But the greatest achievement was that I completed the tutorial (although I will likely expand it later when I got some more features) and started building the newbie area. I got an outdoor map:

And a small instanced dungeon with a new water-born mob:

What I really need now are more and better map tiles so that the environment doesn't look that blocky anymore. Blocky might be en-vogue after the success of Minecraft and Terraria, but I want to do better.