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[Kyzrati]

Hahaha, yeah... I also cut off even more columns off to the right

The full particle files are much crazier, but I only showed a tiny snippet on the blog. Fortunately back during the 7DRL I just copied and recolored a bunch of existing (X@COM) particle scripts so it didn't take much time. Otherwise I never would have finished by the deadline!

That also meant there was a lot of repetition, but most players didn't make it more than half-way through the game so it wasn't a big deal. This time around all the effects are being redone so everything'll look a bit more polished and unique.

[JobLeonard]

But seriously, I hope you are not manually tweaking all of these values in a text editor? I mean, if you already got the code for interpreting those text files anyway, making the step to tweaking those values and saving it again as text should be relatively easy and worth the investment, as it makes finetuning the game a lot easier.

[Kyzrati]

making the step to tweaking those values and saving it again as text should be relatively easy and worth the investment, as it makes finetuning the game a lot easier.

Sort of. When you have this much data it's better to tweak using spreadsheet software. Most everything should ideally fit more or less within the confines of some mathematical formula that balances it towards a specific goal. That's how the original data was created: Defined goals -> generated results in spreadsheet.

There will be more individual tweaks this time around due to a greater number of truly unique items, so we'll see if balancing/tweaking will require a different method. Getting close to playing with the data, but not quite ready yet. Still working on planning out the specific item types.

[JobLeonard]

Come on, just think of how much the workflow of balancing gameplay would improve with live coding!

(or is that already possible by editing text files while running the game? That would be... interesting)

[Kyzrati]

Some of the text files are able to be reloaded while the game is running, yes

Not the items, but I could easily enable that if I find myself tweaking lots of item values. I'm generally against any kind of extra work that may or may not be useful, so I avoid any productivity enhancements until circumstances prove they'll save time. Right now it's too early to tell for items, but I *did* find that hot-swappable particle scripts (which require lots of tweaking to get right) did save huge amounts of time--planning on mentioning that in a future blog post. I used to restart the game every time I made a little change while designing particle effects, now a single debug key and it just re-loads the particle files!

[JobLeonard]

... which basically allows you to leverage a whole slew of programs made to manipulate text files. Sounds sexy, in a unix-y way.

[Kyzrati]

Yep, though I try and play with technical aspects of development as little as possible, in the interest of finishing a game

About that game...

New design-oriented post about the player character himself: Cogmind.

[Kyzrati]

Working on the item list now. Posted an overview of the item types and many sub-types, including a discussion of how they're distributed throughout the game.

[Kyzrati]

I made some joke box art to go along with the latest post about devs playing their own game:

[JobLeonard]

Monolithic. Needs more in-game screenshots, like this one. Yes, it's a mock-up. But so are most in-game screenshots on real game boxes.

[Kyzrati]

For sure. I tried to line the side with some cool ASCII guns, but they don't work at the small resolution I was doing that in. A proper job would've been done in a much higher resolution (and sharper) then shrunk as necessary. Heh, finally used the 3D feature in PS, though, after using that program for over 15 years.

[JobLeonard]

Congats! Yeah, never had a use for that one either.

[Kyzrati]

How the items were balanced for Cogmind, in 1500 words and 6 charts!

[Kyzrati]

Working on content now. Read about (and watch!) ASCII particle effects in development.

[JobLeonard]

This made me think: can you charge up your laser/plasma beam for a burst? What if small glitches start showing up across the entire screen starts like mild white noise if you overcharge it, as if you are pushing beyond the limits of your own hardware?

[happymonster]

Looks brilliant!

However, I think a different font might look better

[locknic]

This is bloody brilliant. I love it.

[Kyzrati]

Thanks guys!

However, I think a different font might look better

Are you referring only to what you see in these animated images? Or have you looked at other screenshots elsewhere? You mean the map font? Or the text font? (They use different fonts.) It's *really* tough to create a font that both has a bit of a sci-fi touch and is easy to distinguish all letters at small sizes. I haven't yet finalized the map font, so there's still work to do there, but I'd like to know what you mean so that when I do get around to working on the fonts I can take your opinion into consideration!

This made me think: can you charge up your laser/plasma beam for a burst? What if small glitches start showing up across the entire screen starts like mild white noise if you overcharge it, as if you are pushing beyond the limits of your own hardware?

You can't charge as an action, though it would be fairly easy to have a laser-charging particle animation trigger interface static or some similar effect. Something to add to the "polish" list for future consideration. Right now the interface does have a system for displaying temporary effects like overheating, taking damage, system corruption, etc. so it could be integrated into that.

I can imagine the type of animation you describe would do a good job of emphasizing the power of some of the later weapons that can be found. Having an effect like that would be another reward for managing to obtain and use one. There is at least one energy cannon that requires massive amounts of power to fire (to the point that you must attach extra batteries), but will disintegrate pretty much anything.

[happymonster]

Sorry I meant the textfont. Maybe it's a bit too narrow?

[Kyzrati]

Ah, the text font. Yeah, it's pretty narrow because the engine requires it to be exactly half the width of the map font. You can play the game at a larger resolution than what I show in screenshots, but I haven't made those text fonts yet. All shots of the game are currently using a 6x12 font (half width of 12x12), which can be increased to 8x16 if you have enough screen space (1280x960, which I would imagine lots of players can handle these days). At 6x12 it's even more difficult to stylize anything... Most normal fonts would be a little wider. Having too wide a font has its own problems though, since being a terminal emulator it's monospaced without kerning.