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[JasonPickering]

so still going. trying to fix the pathfinding code for the moment. its being a bit of a pain. pathing breaks when one very special occasion happens, and it happens more then I thought it would. Once that gets fixed I can move on to other things. In the mean time I planned on working on the boss monster, but the bosses seem a little silly at the moment, they don't really add much to the combat. So I might forgo them and work on more variety of enemies.

[wademcgillis]

also hitting the boss will "Dizzy" them for a few turns

I believe the industry standard term for this is stun-lock 

Touch fuzzy get dizzy.

 

[CK]

Posting to follow this.
Godspeed, holy diver.

[cynicalsandel]

I like the look of this. I will play it when it is done.

[JasonPickering]

you should. everyone should. I hope to have something playable soon. My goal is to make a very simple core game. like you start up are given 5 different types of enemies to battle through and 1 boss. Then if that works I can expand it so you are given a location each location has different enemies and you fight 5 enemies form the pool of that location, and a boss is selected from the boss pool. so I can expand the game easily.

[johntorkington]

Sent you an email about this game. Love the sprite art!

[JasonPickering]

small update:
having a problem with the turn system. I am activating the turn system after you attack, but its making a list of all the enemies before they are killed by any chain reactions. this is causing the game to just hang when it tries to activate a monster that no longer exists.

[JasonPickering]

Hey Guys. still going strong. doing some UI stuff today, and tearing out huge sections of useless code and cleaning up the character code. Still having a problem with the Turn System. I really don't understand how to do it. this is my main hold up now as it freezes the game.

[happymonster]

I don't quite see what the problem is with the Turn system? Are you marking enemies as dead before you go through the list of enemies?

[JasonPickering]

yeah well the problem seems to be this. when an enemies health reaches 0 they are moved really far away off the island. when it gets the list of all monsters it goes through them. if their health is 0 it removes them from the game. I am using flashpunk and want to save on memory so I use FP.world.recycle (it reuses the same entities saving on memory) if I use FP.world.recycle every once in a while the game freezes and goes no forward not completing the rest of the code. if  use FP.world.remove which just kills it no problems what so ever, both functions should act exactly the same, but don't in this instance.

[happymonster]

Hmm.. Sorry, never used Flashpunk. However you will only ever have a small amount of enemies at once in the game won't you, so why just not remove at the end of a level / map?

[RCIX]

Quick suggestion: just use world.remove unless you can trace a memory problem back to using that? ^^

Edit: ninja'd and i didn't even pay attention

[BlueSweatshirt]

Just use world.remove and don't hassle with the management stuff
Flash is pretty good about selectively clearing objects from memory and such. Also, from what I can imagine all enemies should prove to be very small in their data footprint. What you want to be more selective about is what image/sound data you keep loaded in, which you don't have much control of.

[JasonPickering]

I ended up switching to that. I hastily coded a lot of this and it seems to be causing a lot of problems. I almost wonder if it would be better to start over, although I am loathe to do that. I need to fix the turn management now, then move on to player movement, then monster movement, and then I think I am done. I totally understand why Desktop Dungeons did no enemy movement it was a brilliant idea and one I wish I had thought of. I was trying to see if I could make enemies stationary, giving the player more choices, but severally limiting him, because of the smaller landmass to fight on.

[rek]

I didn't know American Thanksgiving lasted so long.

[JasonPickering]

yeah thought I had updated this but apparently not. I did make actually get as far as I wanted. I met some problems along the way that stopped me from getting everything done, but the game needs some serious polish, so thats whats going on now, as well as cleaning up mechanics, the original idea was good, but not great. so I am fixing it up



well that's what one of the islands will look like. Everything is moving along, My Main concern at the moment, is the player spends more time avoiding monsters then fighting. I had the problem where the player is not motivated to defeat the monsters. the game becomes more about moving around the monsters then engaging them.

Couple Ideas I had for motivating monster fighting is..
- Enemies need to be defeated to unlock the bridge
- there are so many enemies that you need to clear a path
- Enemies are your food. you must kill them to stay alive
- Day/Night cycle. kill monsters during the day, because they will kill you at night

[BlueSweatshirt]

The locked bridge one is probably the easiest one to implement and will do the least to change the dynamics of how your game plays.(for instance, using them as food might introduce other problems. Same as a day/night cycle, etc.)

[JasonPickering]

yeah, I was thinking of setting each island almost like a puzzle, you dont just go in and slaughter everything, but you need to think about what you are doing, but havent come up with a really good idea yet. I still like the idea of stationary monsters. it means I dont need to do any monster AI, Pathfinding, or turn Handling, but then The levels need to be made more puzzle like The Tower of the Sorcerer. My main issue is 1. if I get all the coding stuff out of the way the monsters all feel the same. and that wasn't my original intention. I might go back to the older way of guys actually moving towards you. and I will just have to take my time and code super precisely to make sure I don't get any terrible bugs like last time that make the game unplayable and because my code is such a mess there is no way to find out whats causing them.

[JasonPickering]

Update: Bunch of stuff has been finished on this:

1. Created Island Generation Code
2. Redid the turn System (Works excellent)
3. Redid the Character movement code

Next on the list is implementing the new pathfinding system, and then Dropping in the Combat functions. at that point the game will be done engine wise, and it will just be adding new enemies.

[JasonPickering]

Okay. Huge Update!

1. redid Player movement system
2. Redid Monster AI
3. Redid Monster Pathfinding
4. Redid Monster Movement
5. Added Death
6. Added a Goal (Philosophers stone on Island 5)
7. Changed to Mouse Controls for the Iphone Port.

Next up is the addition of potions which will give the player immense power. I was going to post a build for everyone, but the game is so hard without potions, it seems pointless. Once Potions are in and working (item drops, inventory, using) I should be able to post everything I have.