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TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsVolund - Medieval Fantasy 2D MMORPG
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Author Topic: Volund - Medieval Fantasy 2D MMORPG  (Read 11341 times)
ITS_Mike
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« Reply #40 on: February 06, 2015, 08:35:25 AM »



Today's game development livestream is starting at 8:30am PST!


Schedule

First off, I’ll need to plan out iteration 41 which is starting today. After that, I will be finishing the grabbing feature from yesterday.

The stream will last until 12:00am PST, and resume at 1:00pm PST.


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ITS_Mike
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« Reply #41 on: February 09, 2015, 08:30:58 AM »



Today's game development livestream is starting at 8:30am PST!


Schedule

Today, finally, the grabbing feature will be finished! After that, Jake and I will be sitting down to figure out which mechanic to implement next.


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ITS_Mike
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« Reply #42 on: February 10, 2015, 12:02:17 PM »



Today's game development livestream is starting!


Schedule

During today's livestream, Jake will be prototyping Volund's combat system. Jake is the designer/artist/creative individual on the team. He is using Stencyl to quickly prototype gameplay ideas.

Later today, Mike will be finishing the grabbing mechanic... Or at least everyone on the team, including him, sincerely hopes it will be done! That mechanic has been haunting the technical side of development for quite a while, and we are all eager to have it finished.


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ITS_Mike
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« Reply #43 on: February 12, 2015, 08:24:38 AM »



Today's game development livestream is starting!


Schedule

Today, Mike will be implementing the “Hinder Movement” game mechanic. This mechanic supplements the grabbing mechanic, and will allow you to prevent other characters from running away as quickly.

Jake will be working on prototyping the combat system. He is making good progress in this area.

There will be a new version of Volund released later today, so be sure to keep an eye out for that!


Watch the Livestream

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« Reply #44 on: February 12, 2015, 10:18:55 AM »

All your screenshot links on the first page are broken.  Seems related to the name change.
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ITS_Mike
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« Reply #45 on: February 13, 2015, 10:35:50 AM »

All your screenshot links on the first page are broken.  Seems related to the name change.

Ah, yeah, I deleted the old Areum screenshots when the name was changed. Thanks for letting me know!
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ITS_Mike
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« Reply #46 on: February 13, 2015, 10:46:45 AM »

Friday Comic

First off: The Friday comic! This was inspired by an unexpected behavior in the grabbing mechanic for Volund, the 2D MMORPG my brother, father, and I are developing. The grabbing mechanic will allow your character to reach out and push another character, or even drag them away. Apparently it also works across map borders




What's New?

Well, since the last development log we released, a few things have happened.


Volund Version 0.1.0 Released

First off, version 0.1.0 of the first pre-production prototype for Volund was released. You can give that a try over here: http://www.ifthensoftware.net/volund

It includes a version number at the top-left corner of the screen. This will make it easier to keep track of bugs and which exact version was causing the problem.

Guests can now access the game as well. This means that you no longer need an account to play the game.


Changes to Automated Testing

I have decided to drop automated testing for game mechanics. The reason is simple: We are in early pre-production, and these are all just prototypes. Because they are all prototypes, they are changed frequently if not outright scrapped! So writing automated tests does not make sense at this point.

However, I will still be writing automated tests for engine-level features. The engine most likely will not change as frequently as the rest of the game.


Volund Version 0.2.0 Release

Version 0.2.0 of the first prototype for Volund was also released. This morning in fact. Be sure to head on over to http://www.ifthensoftware.net/volund and check it out.

The major change for this version is that the framework for grabbing is in place. You can now press the space bar to enter "grabbing mode", although it doesn't do anything gameplay-wise yet.


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ITS_Mike
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« Reply #47 on: February 16, 2015, 08:22:13 AM »



Today's game development livestream is starting at 8:30am PST!


Schedule

Today Mike will be finishing the hindering movement game mechanic and possibly working on the "drag grabber" mechanic. Both of these mechanics are part of the overall "grabbing" game mechanic which will allow characters to interact with other characters in the game.

There will be an hour break for lunch at 12:00pm PST, but besides that we will be streaming till 5:00pm! Hope to see you there.


Watch the Livestream

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ITS_Mike
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« Reply #48 on: February 16, 2015, 10:45:39 PM »

Engine Doesn't Allow Fast Enough Prototyping

Well, I have learned one thing over the past few iterations: Adding game mechanics takes a long time. A very long time.  Just the framework for the grabbing feature has been in development for the past couple months.

So, I've identified a problem. Now what? Well I need to figure out how I'm going to solve it. I believe one of the major issues is the way the code is designed at the moment. It's desperately needing some large overhauls.

With that in mind, I'm going to try and spend extra time refactoring and redesigning. This will be in addition to the work I normally do on the livestream, and I'm not planning on livestreaming it.

One problem with deciding that a code base needs to be reworked is that you can easily get stuck only reworking it. This means you don't make any forwards progress on new features. Doing the redesign as extra work, rather than replacing existing work time, should help prevent this from happening.


Hand Holding Turns Violent

While on the livestream today, some players decided to form a circle and  "hold hands" using the grabbing feature. This was all well and good, but then the circle was abruptly disrupted and the whole thing turned into a melee! Fists were swinging, characters were running all over the map... It was chaos! Also quite funny, haha.




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ITS_Mike
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« Reply #49 on: February 17, 2015, 05:38:01 PM »

Hindering Movement is Finished

The biggest news I have today is that the "hindering movement" mechanic is finally finished!  Here is an animated gif of it in action:



With this mechanic, you can approach another character, grab on to them, and then prevent them from moving away quickly. After grabbing the character, he is unable to move in any direction without a delay.

The hindering effect only lasts for a single tile. However, that could be significant, particularly in a combat situation.


Bug Fixing with Friends

Before starting work on the next game mechanic, I needed to exterminate a bug. The bug was first discovered last night right before the livestream ended. I didn't have a chance to fix it then, so it got tacked on to today's work list.

The glitch happened when a character grabbed a target character and then followed closely behind them. After only a couple steps, the server would crash.



After a very long debugging session, two and a half hours in fact, the problem was found and squished: The server was issuing a grab command without first making sure that the grabber wasn't...  Uh... Grabbing.

Thank you very much to the people in the Twitch chatroom, and Voidinc_ in particular, for helping me find the problem. It would have eluded me for much longer without your assistance!


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ITS_Mike
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« Reply #50 on: February 18, 2015, 08:11:27 AM »



Today's game development livestream is starting at 8:30am PST!


Schedule

On today's livestream, Mike will be working on the "grabber dragged along" mechanic. He started work on this mechanic in yesterday's stream, and it's making very good headway!

The "grabber dragged along" mechanic will cause a character who is grabbing another character to be dragged along with them. In addition to that, it will slow down the grabbed character.

The stream will be going on break a little early today so that the team can participate in this week's #IndieDevHour. The intermission will last from 11:00am PST till 1:00pm PST. Feel free to participate in the #IndieDevHour hashtag on Twitter though. The more the better!


Watch the Livestream

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ITS_Mike
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« Reply #51 on: February 18, 2015, 09:21:43 PM »

Uh... That Shouldn't be Happening

So today started off with fixing a rather odd bug. You see, the- Uh... Well. This is easier shown than described:



So. That was happening. Fortunately I managed to fix it (not without the help of the livestream viewers in the chat - thanks!)

The problem, like with most bugs, wound up being relatively simple: The character's velocity was being incorrectly set after changing maps.



The real issue is that the server works with coordinates and velocity measured in tiles. The client, however, uses pixels. This is definitely on my "I need to refactor this" list.


All Aboard the Game Mechanic Train!

As you may know, I've been working on the "grabbing" feature. This breaks down into several mechanics, but here is the basic idea: You can "grab" another character and push them/pull them out of the way, or hold them in one spot. Very useful in combat.

One of the mechanics is that if the character you are grabbing tries to move, they pull you along with them. This will eventually result in slower movement speed, but that is still being worked on.

At the request of the livestream viewers, I tried grabbing the character which was grabbing the other character, and then moving... Thus was born The Train! Choo choo!




« Last Edit: February 18, 2015, 10:03:43 PM by Michael Grand » Logged

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« Reply #52 on: February 18, 2015, 10:20:33 PM »

Why are there not so many replies too this.. I really like the look of it!  Smiley

Great work. Is there going to be a storyline? I think that, along with some missions, would make this awesome.
At the moment it is a sweet game, but I don't know what content it will have.
Looking good!
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My twitter is @5Mixer.
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« Reply #53 on: February 19, 2015, 04:32:56 AM »

I would highly recommend decoupling pixel positions from tile positions for the server. The server will never need the pixel positions as I'm assuming they are only aesthetic, but the client should have a synchronised tile position and an interpolated "screen" position
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ITS_Mike
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« Reply #54 on: February 19, 2015, 07:25:21 AM »

Why are there not so many replies too this.. I really like the look of it!  Smiley

Great work. Is there going to be a storyline? I think that, along with some missions, would make this awesome.
At the moment it is a sweet game, but I don't know what content it will have.
Looking good!
Thanks! We don't know what content it will have yet either, haha The game is still in pre-production. But as we learn more about what exactly we'll be creating, we'll update this devlog!

I would highly recommend decoupling pixel positions from tile positions for the server. The server will never need the pixel positions as I'm assuming they are only aesthetic, but the client should have a synchronised tile position and an interpolated "screen" position
Yeah, it's on my "I need to refactor this" list Smiley
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ITS_Mike
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« Reply #55 on: February 19, 2015, 08:16:44 AM »



Today's game development livestream is starting at 8:30am PST!


Schedule

On today’s livestream, Mike will be finishing the “grabber dragged along” mechanic. The only thing that’s left to be done is reducing the movement speed of the grabbed character.

After that, the grabbing mechanics will be tested under normal networking conditions. What this means is that Jake and Mike will be testing the game on the private staging site. Up until now, the grabbing mechanics have only been tested on a local network, so things might break when testing over the internet.

There will be the usual break at 12:00pm PST, but we’ll return at 1:00pm and be streaming all the way till 5:00pm PST!


Watch the Livestream

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ITS_Mike
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« Reply #56 on: February 19, 2015, 08:21:40 PM »

It was a dark and stormy night...

No, not really. Although the morning certainly started off cold


Bugs, Bugs, and um... Bugs

Today was full of bug fixing, which I expected going into it.  The day started off with implementing the final part of the "grabber dragged along" mechanic: Slowing the speed of the target's movement.

Things were going quite well, until this happened:



I spent most of the morning fixing this fun little bug, and part of my lunch break too! The problem wound up being related to storing the grabbing direction and the movement direction as two separate states.

Storing them separately wasn’t the problem, necessarily. However, the code that handles dragging the grabber behind his target was using the wrong one!

To recreate the problem, you had to first grab another character. Let’s say that you grab them while facing north, like in the animation above. You then press the down arrow key to “move” south. Because you are grabbing another character, you don’t move. But! Your character’s movement direction is still updated.  When the character you grabbed tries to move, you’ll be “dragged” in the direction you are “facing”… South!


The Internet Destroys Everything

The latter half of the day consisted of lag testing. This involved deploying to the staging site, and then seeing how badly latency would affect the new grabbing mechanics.

Sadly, it was pretty bad. One bug which I spent four hours solving was allowing characters to run right by grabbers. If there was enough lag, you could run right by another character who was trying to grab you.

This was being caused by some code in the server which would correctly grab the character, but then immediately cancel the grab! I added some additional checks, and the glitch seems to have been resolved.

The last bug I ran into, and the one which I didn’t manage to fix, is demonstrated here:



If you have three characters, with two of them grabbing two others in a row, the last one in the chain will disappear when switching maps! I suspect the “caboose” is being teleported into the map’s border, but I have yet to prove that theory.


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« Reply #57 on: February 20, 2015, 06:20:31 AM »

Sorry to say but it really looks like you may need to refactor (and restructure) a lot of the underlying systems Sad
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ITS_Mike
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« Reply #58 on: February 20, 2015, 07:17:32 AM »

Sorry to say but it really looks like you may need to refactor (and restructure) a lot of the underlying systems Sad

Yup Sad
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ITS_Mike
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« Reply #59 on: February 20, 2015, 11:13:36 AM »

Play Volund p1.0.3.0



Version 0.3.0 of the first pre-production prototype for Volund has been released! You can try it out here: http://www.ifthensoftware.net/volund/


Changelog

  • You can grab another character by facing them and pressing space.
  • When you grab another character, you are dragged behind them when they try to move directly away.
  • Characters that are being grabbed run away at half their normal speed.
  • Fixed a server crash from version p1.0.2.0.


Known Bugs

  • Sometimes when being dragged across a map border, your client will crash/freeze.
  • If there are three characters grabbing in a row, and they are all dragged across a map border in either the north or south direction, the character in the back will vanish.

If you have any further information on these bugs, or if you have a new bug to report, please post it on the official bug reports forum located here: http://www.ifthensoftware.net/forums/forum/bug-reports/


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