I've been using Filezilla for some time and haven't had a problem; but then again since I've had it for a bit maybe I missed the time when it got jacked.  All I do is update it from time to time and my AV has not freaked out so ... good? :D

[Update #4]

Update #4
Cleave ability.

Added a new melee based ability for swinging at surrounding enemies. This required a fair bit of work upgrading existing systems:

• Required a new 'arc' range based on a pivot position, facing direction and radius.
• Abilities could only hit a single target, easy enough to improve this, but also required a refactor of the animation callback system (to provide on screen feedback timed with the animation).

This work will be useful for other abilities, so very worthwhile. I have further plans for this ability, which I'll be working on next, and will add a new mechanic.

I really like the cleave, something about the timing, the animation and watching the hit numbers roll is pleasing to the eye .. the kind of thing that makes the player feel like they are kicking ass. Good job!

Hello,

To follow up on the set of tutorials I've been doing the past week I am doing a diffuse painting tutorial using Mudbox 3D today using my Servant of Dagon model.

I go over some basic painting tools, how to approach using reference, and paint a new texture from start to finish in an exploratory fashion

Deab - what 3d application are you using to do your rat model?

This week I wanted to work on getting a new monster model in to the game, but it takes a gigantic tonne of work to do all the 3d modelling, uv mapping, texture painting, sculpting, rigging, and animation as you can imagine!

However I decided that I had to try and do this  - so far if you've been following I've only been showing one enemy in screenshots, the skeletal footman.  While I hope everyone loves a good skeleton it was simply not nearly enough visual variety for people to remain excited about over the long term!

So I began a mad scramble to put this guy together - giving myself a goal of doing it in one week. Thankfully he's been on my design list for a while and I knew much of what I wanted out of the model.  Dagon is the evil god of the universe in this game and he has both dragon / serpent as well as darker cthulu like qualities.  So these Servant's of Dagon are a reptilian race who worship him and act as his agents in the game.


Back view of model

Realize of course I'm a guy with a full time job, a wife and kid and I do all my dev on the time  I can squeeze in between all of life's other commitments so were talking about 1.5 hours a day MAX and maybe 4 hours per day on the weekend.

I did not get him fully animated so you could say I failed my goal - however I did get him in game with the beginning of an idle animation.  Having set such an aggressive goal I was able to stay very focused and having got a nice looking model in game in such a short time I am really pleased!




What's a bit odd (to me) is he looks much better in Mudbox than he does in Unity 5. I'm not sure why as I brought over high res materials and normal maps etc. He doesn't look bad either - just not as spectacular and I can't be sure if I'm doing something wrong or if its just how it goes?  After seeing the Blacksmith demo video from Unity 5 I can't help but feel I am doing something wrong and losing out on visual fidelity if I knew the right buttons to press!

If you have any hints or tips on how to improve my characters look in game drop me a line I'd love to hear about them!

This week I focused on tying in the logic of doors and gates like the porticullis I implemented last week in to the logic for the game.

So this required some code changes in several areas:

- player movement
- monster movement
- level logic code
- additional scripts on game objects in the scene

While this isn't a lot to show off visually in a screenshot I did try to record a video but my software kept crashing when I tried to record audio!  Unfortunately that took too long and I'm just going with a screenshot today.

Hopefully I'll figure out what's going on with the video cap software soon and I'll try to get a video update soon as I haven't done one in a while and many things have changed.

The other thing I took on this week is a second iteration of the inventory and character inspection sheets.

This screenshot shows off the new inventory - which if you compare to older screenshots this now hugs the left and right rather than obscuring the whole screen.




This looks nicer - as obviously you can still see what is going on in the game as you tinker with your inventory - and avoid getting clobbered if a monster is coming!

There is further work to do in the inventory iteration, I would like to polish the graphics up a bit and I have a mouse-over inspector but for some reason its really  jittery so I need to solve that problem so the UI feels smooth rather than touchy.

That's it for this week, thanks for reading!

Last week I shared the new Portcullis that I was able to get in to the level format and editor for the Rise of Dagon.



As anticipated I went ahead and implemented more items in to the level format.

So this week I have added the following:
uncovered pits
covered pits (traps essentially)
pressure plates
floor braziers

An important note to make though ; I did not put in the logic to control the pressure plates and the covered pit doors.. that will have to be in a future update as it took a fair bit of work to get this content in this week.

I had one problem when doing it and that was the default Unity UI doesn't have a 'drop down' list so I did a really quick toggle for the implementation of the covered pit vs the uncovered pit but I could see this was going to get really laborious and inefficient eventually.

Some googling turned up a thread on the Unity forums talking about this implementation of a drop down list someone shared that looks promising (but I have not tried out yet).  Have you heard of any other good tutorials or drop down lists people have shared as of the 4.6 GUI rollout? I know a lot of people probably have needs in this area?

I also added some additional code to the logic of the player and monster movement that makes it so you can't step in to the same square as a component such as a brazier (there will eventually be other ones)





Above I show a shot from within the Unity editor that shows the light probes in the scene and an early version of the uncovered pit.

And then finally below I have the uncovered pit in an actual in-game screenshot that was placed with the level editor:




Right now you can walk right over them, I look forward to making the code that has you 'drop down' the pit and fall to the next level or potentially die - that should be a fun bit of code!

It was on Wednesday that I did some of these shots and Unity 5.0 was released .. so these shots are the first one's that are using a production build of Unity 5.  It was interesting because as with several of the beta builds when I loaded the project up some of the default shader properties must have changed once again and I was forced to make changes to my materials mainly in the area of the metallic and smoothness properties.

Overall though I ended up feeling like this final tweak to the shader seemed to improve the visual quality of the level just a little bit.

Another thing I've done this week is add just a little touch of ambient light to the levels.  It makes everything more 'visible' on darker screens ; but it then makes it so the level isn't quite as dark and scary so I'm not sure if I like it or not yet? It is nice to be able to see things for sure but I do want to build an atmosphere that the dungeon is a scary place so I think I will end up tweaking it down - or potentially pushing it up and down depending on if you have a light source on with your party perhaps?

The Brazier I added seems to have some problems in that it exposes the general weakness of the fire sprite I'm using at the moment (looks way too saturated and thick to me?) as seen in the shot below:



I've put that down on my list to make improvements on but for now it's a nice additional to the lighting possibilities in the level!

Finally here's a nice shot showing a pit and a brazier around a corner:



Thanks for reading, see you next week!

Its funny  I've had pro for a while .. I used the profiler a few times to just glance at my project but I can't ever find anything useful in it .. I guess I need to do some tutorials on it because right now I get no use at all  out of it

Nice to hear your transition to Unity 5 wasn't too horribly painful , did you get a message they were converting your scripts?

I know when I upgraded mine in beta they had made a few changes to my scripts that when I later went back to do more writing I had to glance over it and go "oh -- that's how I should do it now??" but it wasn't too scary.  What was your experience like?

This week I have approximately two weeks of work to share for you.  All of that work went in to diving back in to the level editor for The Rise of Dagon and adding portcullis doors to the editor and getting them in the game.
 


I also added those big clunky dungeon 'wall switches' so you could open and close them.

portcullis door with switch

The material on the switch looks too simple right now but it was more important to get it in the game and working than it was to polish the texture on it.

The really cool thing about adding in the portcullis door this stretch was that it added about 25% more visual variety to the current level layouts and it really just made things a lot more visually inspiring for me - such that I've decided I'll be focusing on adding more features to the level format for the next couple of weeks as my primary focus.



In closing I quickly wanted to mention if you enjoyed reading my 3 Year Indie Retrospective you might also enjoy year 2, and year 1 respectively. I had meant to link them in-line in the 3 Year retro but forgot to  do so as it took me a week to write all that up and by the time I was done that thought was gone from my head!

Thanks for reading, see you next week!

I really love turned based combat games - there's a really rich history (X-COM, Heroes of Might and Magic,OGRE, many others).

I'll be watching to see how your game progresses!

I wrote a little mock-article on reddit in response to someones little article about the state of mobile gaming ; I think it applies just as well to desktop market and sort of mirrors some of your sentiments.. I've created mobile and desktop apps and found them to be equally void of response when published:

===================================================
The State of Mobile by Carl Kidwell of Infernohawke Entertainment

Ever see a TV with that black and white scramble of white noise?

Now imagine that screen is the mobile application marketplace.

Now image you are one of those dots on the screen.

Remember the dots are always moving, every moment a new dot replaces the last dot and you can't focus on anything because the noise is overwhelming.

Welcome to the mobile marketplace of 2015.

But its worse than the picture I've painted so far ( you didn't think that was it did you?).

No no no, its much worse!

You see really big players in the market, with already deep pockets, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to artificially place themselves high on the rating list to ensure their AAA application is placed at the top of the new applications and that they stay there. This system is gamed and rigged to ensure that you application does not appear there because they can outspend you at a rate of 100,000 to 1 to ensure their success.

Furthermore your shiny new independent application may appear on the new application list for as little as one day, or if extremely fortunate in some cases up to a week. The random bits of traffic you get as a member of the white noise crowd literally has the same astronomically low chance as a lottery ticket to pick up enough momentum to be visible to a casual user after it rolls off of the new applications page.

Finally to top it off - even when searching for your application by its very name you might have to scroll through 26 pages of results - that are all higher ranked and share nothing in common with your applications name - before you finally find your application.

In a nutshell the state of the mobile application market is a cross between a gold rush, a rock star dream, and a snowball's chance in hell.

On the upside however you can easily publish your app on the iOS Store for only $99.00 a year and Google Play for $25 one time fee.

Good luck ever making that money back.

Could you solve some of those inheritance woes by using interfaces? One nice thing is that Unity can now officially do GetComponent on interfaces so you can use them a lot more aggressively and you can implement multiple.

The inheritance I have right now largely makes sense the way my brain likes to think about it ; which I think is pretty important for me.

Also the inheritance hierarchy has not reached anything of the sort of depth to create more burden than value its bringing (IMO anyways).

I am aware of the ability to GetComponent on interfaces and I use that for sure.

Right now I use interfaces on NPCs/Monsters to enable behavior on them; and when checking if a NPC/Monster can do certain things.  Its been very useful!  Thanks for the tip though, had I not been aware that would be a big tool to miss out on for Unity.

I've combined interfaces with non monobehavior components to avoid too much boiler plate code. You can do stuff like say handling the PickUpObject interface call with a StandardIconPickUp() component that fulfills the request but then on the InspectObject if you need something special handle it directly.

My BIGGEST source of boilerplate code is the fact I have 4 players inventory to manage; but can only show one on the screen at a time.

So anytime I do an inventory lookup I have to figure out if its P1, P2, P3 or P4 then make a reference to their inventory in a swapEquipment object with the inventory of the player who was selected ; I then perform all the operations on the swapEquipment object (so I don't have to further boilerplate all opreations for p1Inventory, p2Inventory, and so forth.

The second source is in my Icon Libraries ; those have a lot of needs that I spent time making as generic and cross applicable as possible but when it comes down to it in the end .. a cloth hat needs to come with certain details that are different than an iron helm and the icon library has to have logic to handle all the applicable variants.

I am seriously considering whether I could make a "item database" approach that would work better but not ready to take on that level of effort -- I have too many other things I need to implement right now.

You can also get tricksy with PubSub sort of dispatcher setups to combine it with Monobehaviours though Unity examples does this kind of thing with SendMessage sometimes which I dislike. I spend way too much time pondering and redoing this kind of thing. Searching for that perfect implementation can be just as bad as side projects.

I'll have to look in to that more; its a neat idea but I've never implemented something like that; I see how it sounds neat but I'm not sure what use case I have that makes it quite necessary at the moment?

This week was pretty crazy when it came to productivity - for some reason I was just hitting goals one after another and was able to get a lot done!

I would like to think it was just from pure awesomeness, but I suspect that I have reached a certain velocity in my inventory system and therefor was able to make a lot of changes in a short time due to having set up much of my system already.

So I was able to create icons (using in part some 3D assets I purchased, and also some items I modeled myself) and then add earrings, rings, necklaces, and arm armor to the game.


Each of these items of course is part of the procedural loot system so there is a very wide variety of items that can be generated out of the combinations of prefixes, suffixes and magical attributes that can be on a weapon.

I was also able to program in the ability to restrict the type of item you can equip according to the slot it goes in. So previously you could drag an gauntlet in to a helmet slot, this is no longer the case.

Further more I was able to get my message system up to speed and create your basic RPG combat log window.  Right now I post some messages to the combat log are for debug purposes, like when a monster sees you -- this will eventually become apparent through either sound design or animations or a combination of those, but for now its a nice way to make sure that the monsters have spotted me and should be behaving as such.




Finally Unity delivered the first RC candidate of Unity 5... RC means "release candidate" meaning apparently they feel it has enough features that they are done adding new features and now they just need to make sure everything is as bug free as they can make it before it ships.

So I took another pass at tuning the graphics as every beta it seems to have gotten out of sync a little bit with my settings or the tone mapping script changes and becomes invalid etc.



Thanks for reading see you next week!

So I did some research and I've been working on the inventory system for my game since Dec 6th. That's pretty much two months of work and today's update was to have been about it; but then I realized its been a long time and while I'm dedicated to finishing my game it would be really easy to just get interested in another project and let it slide off the radar.



This is how games don't get finished!  I know it because I have not finished a lot more games than I actually have finished!

SideQuest : A side project that lives in the depths of my hard drive tempting me to not work on the Rise of Dagon!

I'm not unique in this; every dev I talk to struggles with finishing projects. We all have hundreds of ideas that are exciting and would love to spend time on them.


War Runner was a "runner" genre game with tank based combat as the focus.
I have a buddy at work whom I partnered with to make a mobile game called War Runner (ios / android) last year, since that time we've tried to get another project going together. I think we've started at least six separate games but put them all aside as we quickly get turned off.



We even entertained trying to go back and updating War Runner as we've found a few items could be improved but we made less money on War Runner than the fee's it took to get it on the app stores.

Heck we've even thought about re-using the assets to make a different style game.. War Runner was a typical  3-lane runner style game.  While we were making it we really kept wanting to make a free roaming random tank game where you could blow up things as you drove around and had randomly generated missions pop up on your HUD.

But we can't seem to work on anything for more than 2 weeks before we both agree its just not feeling right and drop it.

The one exception so far was I started a side-project called SideQuest.

The concept for SideQuest was "side scroller meets Diablo" style game.  I was really excited about this to the point I put together the surface level with a village where the player gets their quests, and does their tasks like selling trash items, repairing and getting supplies. (Note: I didn't code in all the inventory and such just made the level, buildings, and placed the NPC's).



I also made a set of prefabs for the first dungeon level and was starting to make a movement controller for the character to prototype combat.
 

SideQuest dungeon looking very slick!

I also tried to share this one with my buddy but he wasn't able to get any work done before losing motivation and we moved on to other ideas for projects to work on together. 

However for me this is really an exciting side project that I really want to go back to when I can! I often imagine when the Rise of Dagon is done that this is the project I will take on myself next!

Also I have been working on a book cover for a friend of mine who wrote a Fantasy novel; and we thought it might be cool to do the cover in Unity 3D .. so I've been spending time here and there trying to compose this scene for his cover; but honestly we've been working on it for a year now and he keeps writing other books instead of finishing this one!


one of many possible book cover images



So yes my friends its not just game developers who  have side projects and can't finish things! Writer's have side-project-itis also!


So in the end though, despite all the temptation, and despite six or more weeks of work on the inventory system bearing fairly heavily on me I did not succumb to temptation of alternate projects this week.

What I actually did was program in the drag-and-drop system for Rise of Dagon and made it so you can drag items from your inventory in to your equipment area as seen below:



And that is how games do get finished my friends; you work through those long dark slogs that are buried in minutiae that never seem to end! Because there is an end in sight and that ending includes a game that I'll be incredibly proud of once I finish it!

Thanks for reading, see you next week!

Hey,

The camera/tablet idea is very interesting.  I think if you had some plot elements that tied in to you being an investigator, or perhaps you were communicating with a scientist who was trying to help you through the hotel/dungeon etc. .. it would add a lot of plot value to tie in to the reason behind using the camera device (In addition to the rewards you spoke about).

So I definitely think its a valid possibility that it could be a good/interesting game play element but obviously your implementation will make all difference on it in the end.

Its probably triggering twice ; I had some problems with that in a toggle I use in 4.6 C# ; I asked if it was bug in the beta forums but no one ever replied.

Assuming its triggering twice whats happening is:

original state == on
toggle 1 - state == off
toggle 2 - state == on

Does that match what your seeing?

EDIT:

Another thought; in your attached image the toggle group says "none" and your mouse over thing is telling you there's no object.

You might need to drag the toggle group in to the inspector to get a reference to the object?

[Inventory : Armor updates]

NOTE: I was moving last week so skipped the Jan 17th update:

===========================
This is going to be a big update today; I have a couple of items to talk about; Inventory updates being large, and the new Affinity Power system discussion.   Affinity Power's are the way that I've finally glued together my concept for the Magic system in Rise of Dagon in an interesting way that makes these powers more than simple spell schools.

This post might be a little TLDR for some folks ; if so feel free to either skip to Inventory or Affinity Power headings depending on your interests!

First though some quick comments about my move ;  last week I was moving and things went reasonably well. I did end up with no Heat and no Hot Water. And no one would come out to look at them as it was the weekend! I called the entire first page of top rated reviews on Yelp and not a single one would help.

Like a true engineer / independent / do it yourself guy I ended up doing some research around the house until I had a suspect and then used Youtube HowTo videos to isolate/verify and fix the guilty breaker fuses in my main breaker panel outside the house.  The problem ended up being one of the breakers was bad ; but did not actually 'trip' so it appeared to be good!

Inventory : Armor updates


So anyways moving business aside it has been two weeks and I wanted to share that the inventory system coding has been going really well.  The week before the move I had done some really productive programming on two evenings in particular and really got a solid start in to breaking the armor in to its proper design.


One challenge I deal with is that all of my base classes for items do not extend Monodevelop; the reason for this is simple of course - you can only inherit from one class and I need the inventory items of each kind to all extend BaseItem so I can address them more easily in code via lists or dictionaries of BaseItems. Ultimately though this ends up creating a design issue in that I need to be able to pick up the Sprite for the icon for the inventory item - which is part of Monodevelop!

So I ended up making separate Icon classes such as IconLightArmor, IconsHeavyArmor, IconsMediumArmor.  These classes have helper methods that can retrieve or look up the icon sprite by the sprites internal ID that I have assigned and then the GUI can do the same. So these helper classes are good - but in the case of something like potions its pretty simple , there are only so many types of potions right?


But in the case of Armor now were talking about a whole new level of complexity for several reasons:

Firstly we have to determine what kind of BaseItem it is (equipment)
Then we have to determine if it is by Light, Medium, or Heavy.
Then we have to determine its Slot such as Helm, Chest, Leg.

So when I ask for a new piece of random equipment I have to figure out that its going to be a Light Helm and have the IconLightArmor class find me specifically a helmet icon -- meaning that icon assignment can't be as random as the initial item generation.

So this ends up being a fair bit of pretty close to Boiler Plate kind of code in each class for Icons. I did enough work in fact I was able to make it all generic code except for the actual Sprite assignment (because of course the Cloth Helmet and the Plate Helmet icons are unique) and the unique IconID's in each class!

I felt pretty pleased with myself when I got this all working and the screenshots you see inline here are showing some icon inspector windows

It was also at this point I realized I had not put any kind of Armor rating on the armor, so it was a very easy task to go to the BaseEquipment class and add a new integer for ArmorRating and then add the armor to the random item generator and the inspector!

There is still a little bit more work that needs doing when it comes to Armor as you'll notice the item names are in ALL CAPS as well as they aren't exactly great item names; but I am reserving that work for when I get in the Prefix and Suffix modifiers for equipment and then finally mix in those prefix/suffix modifiers with naming improvements and well have the full system rounded out at that point.

Affinity Powers


So finally I'm announcing something a bit unique about the game and that is the Affinity Power system!

Previously you may have noticed on the inventory an area that was labelled "resistances" and that is now changed to be "Affinity Powers"



The fantasy universe of the Chronicles of the Dead Sun takes place in a primordial/elemental universe that is inverted in its composition from our current universe.  Instead of  the void of outer space we have in our universe - the Dead Sun universe is filled with matter.

Planets are in fact holes in the endless matter, some of these holes might be the size of a city. Some of the holes are the size of planets, and very occasionally there are holes that are immense..

The point of this at the moment for the Affinity Power discussion is that this primordial universe this game takes place in is intertwined or even overlaps the 6 Primary Elemental planes.

The Primary Element planes are:

• Fire
• Earth
• Water
• Air
• Light (Positive)
• Dark (Negative)

As players are created, and as they level they may either inherit or place points in their Affinity Powers.

Depending on your class, and its abilities Affinity Powers will grant you potentially multiple benefits.

Fire Mage Example:

If you are a Mage type class and have points in the Fire affinity ; then naturally your Fire spells will be more effective.  This is not to say without points in Fire that they would be useless; they would simply be at their base level. A high Fire affinity spell might in fact have a higher critical hit range as well.

In addition this Mage with a high Fire affinity would be more resistant to Fire based spell effects and attacks  against them.

Finally for this example a Mage is a generic caster; but a Mage who has invested in Fire affinity might gain access to specialized Fire spells beyond the core spells available to the Mage class.

Spells have not been designed at this time so this area is very up in the air at this time as to what this will end up looking like.

Water Warrior Example:

Lets also say for example you had chosen the Tortuga race (which is an humanoid turtle race). Being a Tortuga grants you a starting bonus for Water affinity - and over a few levels , or perhaps even with some items bonuses you had raised your water affinity to a high level you would (similar to the Fire Mage) receive a resistance benefit to Water based magic attacks against you - but furthermore healing spells based in the Water Affinity would grant you a larger healing benefit than those who lacked Water affinity that you have!

Furthermore if you had weapons, or armor that had water based power or properties on them you might expect to do more damage with them or gain higher critical ratings the higher your personal water affinity was.

So a Tortuga Warrior with an Ice Sword might be able to both hit for more water damage, and if a freeze proc occurred expect the freeze duration to potentially be longer (if the water affinity is high enough).

Faction Example:


Finally Affinity Powers are not merely magical ; they are also social in effect affinities  -- and like in real life if you share an affinity with someone you are more likely to get along with them!

This area is not designed out yet because I have not placed in NPC interaction yet but the plan is that if you go to a merchant with a really high matching affinity they might offer you an extra magic item for sale that matches the affinity you share.  Or they might give a slight discount to you because of the shared affinity.


In summary Affinity Powers are meant to have a broad effect for your character and react against how your character is built.  While you can not control the random drops you will get in the procedural loot system - it will certainly be a really cool moment when your Dark Mage finds a Longstaff of  Death that grants +10 Dark power!

I wanted to combine this in to something that was a multi-faceted and meaningful attribute for the player rather than just a number on a character sheet that you will not care about at all.

Players interested in min/max will potentially build a party that takes advantage of Affinity Powers such as a Tortuga Healer with Water affinity and seeks out Water affinity gear will make possibly the most effective healer in the game!

Thanks for reading, let me know what you think of Affinity Powers?  See you next week!

Please take a look at the bottle again. Right now it looks like its a red vase because you filled it up to the top, even the glassy neck area which cannot contain any fluid at all. I don't want to be picky but have you tried just to fill it up to the middle and leave the rest transparent all to the top? Might look much better and more realistic.

Source of inspiration

Great read so far. Keep it up!

Hi Vaxx,

Thanks for the great feedback. You are right - I just colored the entire bottle red. 

I see what your saying now ; the assumption is that this is a 'vial' that is clear and you are viewing a fluid level makes it look weird because if that were the case then the top portion of the container would be fully transparent near the cork stopper right?

Do you feel like there is something I could do that would give you the viewer the feeling this is an opaque bottle rather than a glass vial so that you wouldn't have the feeling it looked wrong?

The reason I ask this is the production time to render out a transparent glass surface would take more time and if I can make a small adjustment to the art to change the perception I could use that time to make other art assets if you see what I mean?

In any case thanks for the great feedback I'll take that into consideration.

Thanks deab, much appreciated!