Firewalker DevRamblings 2 blog - damagefilter

Hello there!

It's time for another Dev Ramble because a lot of stuff has been done since the last blog.
I have been working on various editors as well as game components and with the recent release of the Unity 4.6 beta, I was able to start throwing out NGUI from my project.
So that's cool.

So, what did happen?
First of all, there has been put more work into the city spritesheet. The grass was changed, new trees were added and the overall tone was adjusted to be slightly gloomier.
Here's a quick screen grab.

That player sprite there is also a subject to change (a lot). It's supposed to be a battle monk. Only, as you can see, the proportions relative to the environment are waaaay off. We're constantly iterating on it. There will probably also be a second set of larger houses soon.

Additionally to some art improvements, I was working on the save-game system, which is done by now. It's as simple as streaming all entities in a scene into a bunch of bytes and put them into a zip file. When loading scene data it will wipe the entire "default" scene clear and restore what was saved to that zip file. That is it - simply speaking. In reality it does a whole lot more than that.

I have also been working on implementing items in a fashionable way. That is to say, I am mimicking the behaviour of the RPG Maker. You get to define a set of items by names and values. That's what makes up an item. Like this:

Attributes as shown in the editor picture will assume random values (if values apply) between the minimum and maximum value definitions. It's also possible that an attribute is not attached to the item when spawned. So an item may have a super effective or useful attribute but it can only be occasionally found.
This makes for interesting item mechanics in my imagination. I hope it'll come out as good as I think it will, in the end.

Now that items are ready and a framework is layed out, I can start re-doing the whole inventory GUI.
Right now it works via NGUI (the free 2.7 version) but since Unity 4.6 comes with its own GUI system, I'll switch to that instead. This way I can use the same sprite data for inventory display and for displaying items in the world. No fuzzing about with different sprite atlases.

On a related note, the "Tech Foundation" release, which includes all the framework code to be functional, is due in december this year. But I'm through by 59% with all the scheduled tasks. Taking into account fluctuation in plans and requirements, I make it a 47% done.
Serious work started about 3 months ago so I'm about in-time with that planned release.
In december I will make a games page on indiedb too so, if you feel like it, you'll have something to track.

The next big thing I have planned is changing from a state machine to behaviour trees with my AI. It will allow me to make the enemies behave in all sorts of complex or simple ways depending on their defined tree of behaviours and decision making.

For now, that's about it. Thanks for reading!