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[nickproud]

Loving this it's so cool. I like the ode to tabletop games and the possibility of using stealth elements. How is the sound design / audio aspect going? (Just curious as my area is game audio)

Keep up the good work. This is a follow for me! 

[Alec S.]

Thanks!

I haven't done a lot of sound effects work yet, although I've done some work on the soundtrack (including a number of lyrical songs which will be performed by musicians in taverns and such.  I also plan to have a few characters in the game have their own theme songs which play if and when you fight them.)

[nickproud]

Awesome. I like the idea of having different songs in taverns etc.

Let me know if you want any help with audio, I'd be happy to help 

[Alec S.]

Thanks. 

I've been working more on XML serialization for saving and loading character data.  I can now make a character on the character creation screen and load their stats into the actual game.  Next up is saving and loading the costume/appearance of the character.

In addition, Ben has been working on new portrait art, so we should have that to show soon.

[Ben K Evans]

Indeed I have!

The player character's portrait as well as their sprite will be fully customizable. Here are three examples of characters that could be made in-game.

[nickproud]

Awesome. Not enough games featuring bowler hats 

[s0]

Indeed I have!

The player character's portrait as well as their sprite will be fully customizable. Here are three examples of characters that could be made in-game.

cool! are you going to tie the character sprite to the portrait? e.g. if my portrait has a mustache, the sprite gets a mustache too?

[Alec S.]

Yeah.  For the most part, each part of the portrait will correspond to a part of the sprite (although certain aspects like eyes and mouth might only have an impact on the portrait).

[s0]

ok that's cool.

(it's sort of a pet peeve of mine in games with character customization when the portraits and models/sprites are completely unrelated to each other. for instance in wasteland 2 most of the default portraits look nothing like any character you could create w/ the character editor, haha)

[Alec S.]

After much sifting through and rearranging of the real Spaghetti Code that makes up this Spaghetti western, I've got saving and loading of character data, including costume data, working, which will make testing go a lot smoother going forward, as being able to create characters in the editor and load them into the game will make it so I can test new costume pieces and different builds more quickly.

[Alec S.]

Screenshot Saturday

[Alec S.]

The Shotgun in action (with new projectile art)

[Alec S.]

Getting to work on the daunting task of the game's AI system.  Basically trying to keep it very modular, so that I can use the same overall structure for all character, but switch out certain parts of it to fit with a given character.  For example giving them a combat style based on the weapon they wield, giving them personality ticks, or giving them a routine based on their job.  There will also be a number of personality variables which will effect their decision-making in various ways built in to the behaviors themselves. 

[Alec S.]

Made some headway in the AI system.  Ended up deciding it would be better to use RAIN rather than build my behavior tree system from scratch, since I couldn't figure out a way to implement the modularity I wanted in a way that would work well with Unity's editor.  I've made a rough version of basic combat behavior (which I'll add on to as I go along, but it serves it's purpose for testing).  Next is the potentially even more important issue of what happens before combat.  Basically, how potentially hostile NPCs react to you if they catch sight of you (and how that reaction will be different depending on if your gun is drawn). 

[Alec S.]

The Dialogue System

The dialogue system has always been an important part of the game for me, and now that I've started seriously working on it, I thought I'd talk about it some more.  It all originated from the desire to properly recreate the stand-off.  The tension of a conversation that could at any point break out into violence.  The idea was always to have the dialogue be very similar to the diplomacy system of a 4x game.  Rather than having dialogue trees, you have functional pieces of dialogue.  You can make threats, make demands, offer deals, ect...

The difference being I wanted the dialogue system to play out in real time.  I wanted to have it so that all of your standard actions are still available to you during dialogue, thus at any point a character in dialogue could draw their gun, start firing, drop their gun, walk closer, walk away, ect...  And it needs to be seamless so that you always have to be paying attention to what the other person is doing.  Now, it can't be entirely in real time, as things like putting together negotiation options or asking for specific things would require choosing things off menus, and it would be really frustrating if the other person could just shoot you while you're looking through a menu, so there will be some things which will pause the game and let you pick.  But at all times there will be a number of context-sensitive dialogue options available at the press of a button. 

In addition to this, there's a dialogue generator.  What this does is take the functional dialogue (for example "treat" or "demand you drop your gun") and spits out a line of dialogue from a list of customizeable lines of dialogue for that dialogue-type.  Individual characters can be given various verbal ticks (for example, calling everyone "amigo" or "mister") and also entire custom lines of dialogue (for example, in character creation you'll be able to give your character custom threats that they'll use whenever you threaten someone).

The other large part of this will be to tie it into the AI system, and have them react both to dialogue and non-dialogue actions (such as drawing your gun or walking closer to them) based on their demeanor towards the player and their threat level (which the player can, of course, increase by threatening them).

[DevWithoutACrew]

Sweet! Very retro, reminds me a lot of the arcade era!

[Alec S.]

Thanks!   

[Alec S.]

[Zaphos]

Dialog system looks neat!  Nitpicking: Is the font final?  It doesn't quite seem to match the game, to me.  Also seems a bit small?  I'd kinda expect a louder, chunkier font for this game.  (I'm pretty bad at font choosing myself though, so ... dunno.)

[Alec S.]

Yeah, the font is just a placeholder/the default unity font.  It'll be changing before the game is done.