September 2014 – Page 3 – MagicalTimeBean

The Grid, Continued

I couldn’t shake the idea. This morning, my first order of business was trying out pixel-based movement for the Summoner.

It actually seems to work really well. Even placing summons felt natural–I’m having them align to a grid, double the resolution of the tiles, to keep it tidy. It’s actually a lot like how Escape Goat handled a combination of tile grid and pixel accurate movement. Now Aeox can block a two-tile wide corridor… we’ll see how that changes things at the micro level.

Enabling pixel based movement for the monsters opened up a can of worms. Since they swarm so close to one another, I had to bring some of what I learned about collision resolution from Escape Goat, to keep them from merging and overlapping. It brought me back to the good old days of 2011, when, for months on end, every SVN checkin was noted as “collision hell”. I can probably keep this visit much shorter (though I said that to myself every day back then). Collisions are nowhere near as complex as Escape Goat, so basic AABB testing should do the trick.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this will look with dozens of monsters packed tightly together–should be reminiscent of Gauntlet.

The Grid

Man, just when I thought I had a handle on scope.

A friend of mine brought up something interesting this evening. We looked at some footage of Soulcaster, and he remarked that he thinks things would be improved if we took the characters off the grid. (The grid here means the tile-based movement, a la Final Fantasy VI, which all monsters and the player adhere to.)

In the last couple hours I’ve been mulling the idea over, and have a few pros and cons I’m weighing.

Destructibles to Control the Flow of Battle

One of the flaws in Soulcaster I & II was the lack of information the player got in terms of what the next phase of the battle would be. Enemies would simply spawn out of the woodwork, without warning, and you’d have to deal with them immediately. If you’ve got the skills, this isn’t the end of the world, but on your first run through the game, it’s likely you’ll get overwhelmed, have to burn a scroll and a potion, and run around kiting the enemies while trying to set up a formation. It makes it less about tractical positioning and more about fleeing for survival.

In an effort to move the needle a bit from “action” to “strategy”, I developed a system to hint at the evolution of the battle. It involves multi-stage breakable walls and floors, which change the layout of the room as the battle progresses.

boxes

Room Tester – First Look

The latest addition to the Soulcaster 3 editor is the Room Tester. This takes a set of parameters (the room recipe) and generates a room to fit the criteria. So long as you specify the same seed, the room is always generated in the same layout given any recipe.

Here’s what the pattern editor looks like:

Recipe parameters on the left, room preview on the right — Layers and tile properties on the left, editing area on the right

This is the collection of four room split patterns. When a door is marked as a split entrance, it matches one of these with the door to prevent access to it. The + symbol represents the anchor position, where it needs to align with the door in the room. The pattern area is within the colored rectangle. The tiles marked with diagonal lines are required tiles, meaning they have to be included in the room for the pattern to be valid.