Frayed Knights: The Door Is Ajar
Time for More Stuff You Didn't Want To Know about the indie RPG that refuses to take itself too seriously!

Put On An Unhappy Face!
Last week, I started receiving some more artwork for the game. This week, I continued to receive some more facial expressions for all the player characters. Each of the player characters has eight different facial expressions (that's right... a total of 32 portraits for the main characters alone) to use in static dialogs and other parts of the game. The eight expressions are neutral, upset, happy, enraged, disgusted, sly, shocked, and thoughtful.

Hitting Game Mechanics With a +2 Wrench
Another surprisingly large task was to create the character information screens. While dumping the data into various fields in the UI isn't rocket science, I found myself dealing with implementing more stuff and handling yet more repercussions of the redesign.

For example: I want characters to be able to "pinch hit" in each other's classes if the player wants to build them that way (or if I, as the designer, want to customize the monsters that way). But I don't want them to come close to overshadowing each other. Arianna might be able to pull off some "sorceressness" of her own, but she should never be able to match Chloe in potency... and she'll have to sacrifice her own skill as a warrior to do it. In general, it takes about four levels to "mostly" emulate another class by taking the appropriate feats.

So why the pseudo-multiclassing? Well, let's say Dirk is currently unconscious, and you need someone to pick the lock of the dungon door to escape. Or maybe in a pinch, when the enemy spell-slinger is focusing on counter-magicking poor Chloe, Arianna can pull out an almost-as-powerful fireball herself and put some area-effect hurt on the bad guys and annoy the rival sorcerer.

So you can have an entire party of wannabe-sorcerers if you want. Which is cool, until you encounter some highly magic-resistant monsters.

So after a bit of fiddling with implementation, I now have somewhere north of 30 feats in the game (not all functional, but there) so far --- with probably three times that many when I am done. They are being handled and listed properly. I fixed spells so that they can only be cast by characters with the appropriate feats. And I've tightened up the mechanics a bit. I hope.

But Which Side Are The Hinges Facing?
I'd made a commitment to try and get doors done this week, so I had some solid direction when I got done with the feats, spells, and character display logic. The cool thing about doors is I had no freaking clue how I was going to implement them. So it's been a fun ride.

Since I'm a "learn by doing" kinda guy, I started out by modeling a door. I already had a photograph with a cool wooden door obtained from Mayang's Free Textures a couple of years ago. So I cropped, transformed, and modified the photo into something resembling a texture, deformed a cube in Blender to be roughly door-sized and door-shaped, slapped the texture on it, added a collision volume, arranged it in a hierarchy the way the Torque exporter wants it, and boom! I had something horrible. But it took only a couple more passes to get sizes and orientations into the game. So now I had a door which was a static barrier against movement. Total time-to-door was only 30 minutes from start to finish.

But how to get it to work? That took a little longer. First of all, I had to stumble across the obvious way to make it open and shut - through animations. I hadn't animated anything in Blender for a while, so I had to spend some time online brushing up on my dusty skills. The next challenge was that you can only animate the visual object elements under Torque. This means collisions don't animate. Ouch. So while the door might animate opening, it still wouldn't let you pass through it because it's collision was still blocking the doorway.

I kept my solution entirely at the script level. I ripped out the collision information on the door itself, and added an invisible, separate collision object linked to the door by code. When the door gets opened or closed, the script modifies the collision's rotation to match the door's eventual orientation. The collision doesn't really rotate along with the door so much as snap into conformity, but I think it will work just fine.

Next... How does the player trigger the door opening and closing? I just made it a new type of interactive object, like the fountain and talkative NPCs'. Viola! Not only did this allow me to be lazy and write very little new code, but it will (hopefully) provide a more consistent experience for players.

And there we go! A door! This screenshot was taken in the middle of its opening animation. Oh, and I grew tired of the color orange, so I slapped some textures on the dungeon. Nothing too elaborate. Or final. But it makes a huge difference, don't you think?

Who'd have thought making a door would be such a pain in the butt? From 30 minutes on my first pass, the whole thing ended up taking over 3 hours. But at least I only had to solve this problem ONCE. Adding additional doors to a level will be a cinch.

More Concept Art

Here's a "Weed Goblin," probably my favorite of Shawn's concept pieces. You won't encounter any of these in the dungeon itself, but they can be found in the countryside between the temple of Pokmor Xang and the village of Ardin.

My Next Trick Will Be...
August is going by way too fast. The code to make the "First Five Minutes" work is all there, but I've got tons to try and get done between now and November. So for this week:

#1 - The characters aren't really getting sick when they drink from the fountain. I need to test the state code and add illnesses with debilitating effects --- and list those effects in the character information screens.

#2 - Drama Point Gain. So those stars at the top of the screen will actually look like they are doing something.

#3 - Design the Long-Term Fatigue system (more on why this is useful next week).

#4 - Update the design document.

#5 - Get started on inventory system

That's a tall order. It's gonna be a busy week. Again.


(Vaguely) related tiptoeing through weed-goblin infested tulips:
* Coloring!
* The Frayed Knights Get a Makeover
* Frayed Knights: Task Resolution Revisited
* Sucking Slightly Less
* How To Make a Better RPG With Procedural Content

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Labels: Frayed Knights, Game Design, programming, Roleplaying Games

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