Augury Devlog #2

Hello! This is the second, and even more illustrious, devlog for Augury, my little 1GAM thing for September.

Organisationally, what’s happened since last time has been that I fleshed out the design document way more. Part of doing that was defining what the MVP for the game should be. This was quite important to me, as I mentioned before, because I haven’t been doing that for my previous 1GAM’s. What that has resulted in for the most part is exe’s which are a loose bag of mechanics, as opposed to an actual game that you can play from beginning to end.

Here is a link to the design doc where you can read this MVP featureset among other things. In case you super don’t fancy reading that I’ve embedded a screenshot of them below.

I thought about what kind of gameplay I wanted, and the conclusion I came to was that man, diablo style “click on them till they die“ would probably be really boring! With that in mind I wanted to add the ability to block, so you could fun little fights with some back and forth and in the moment strategy, rather than pure ARPG mindlessness. Not that you can’t make a fun combat system like that, but I think it requires a lot of special abilities to change things up and I don’t have time to implement all of those.

The rest of them are defining in detail the framework that needs to exist for this to feel like an actual “game”, besides the actual core combat. It’s important to define these because they’re not sexy, but they’re not free or invisible work, I wanted to be aware of the whole scope of the MVP.

Movement Change

SOMETHING that has changed since I wrote that list of MVP features is that I am no longer doing mouse based movement. As in, you click on a place and the player goes there, or you hold down click and the player continuously runs in the direction of the mouse.

I really tried to make it work, but for the kind of combat game I want to make, one that’s more involved than typical ARPG faire, it just diiiiiidn’t work at all. It was a hard decision to make, as it was literally the very first and only thing in the first version of the project that I uploaded. It’s what’s best though, I knew that as soon as I implemented some basic WASD and the game suddenly felt WAY better to play.

Kill your darlings folks! It’s the right thing to do.

ASSET FORGE

A friend (thanks Aidan!) pointed me towards a program called Asset Forge. For those not in the know it’s a simplified, blocky, 3d modelling program that makes it easier for ham fisted people who are currently terrible 3d modellers (this guy right here), to actually make some game assets.

It’s been great!

I’ve made a range of weapons, a shield, and a terrible helmet, and it’s been VERY easy. This is so wonderful for me as I really enjoy making 3D games, but my lack of actual 3D assets or the ability to create them has been something I feel has held me back a lot.

I’ve downloaded a dungeon tileset for asset forge and plan to build the actual level for the game using it, which is very exciting! Something that actually looks decent!

So far where I’m at in the development is midway through implementing some kind of enemy. I’ve given them health and the ability to die (oh such a cruel creator am I). Next up is having them track close to the player and attack back. This will be an incredibly basic combat system, but it’s a start.

Something I’m having to really resist right now is the endless dive into polishing particular mechanics until they feel good. There are so many things to fix about attacking, but I am only allowing myself to fix them once I’ve actually got a complete game. I don’t want to waste my time polishing different parts before the whole is realised.

Once the combat is ina  more full featured place I’m going to move on to doing the death and respawning, and the ability to “win”, likely just by defeating all enemies on the level. Once that’s done it’s building some kind of actual 3d level, then audio, then I might actually be done my MVP. Which is prettyyy coooooool as then I can start on the endless improvements I want to make.

See you next time!