Last week I got blocking out some new multiplayer levels and in the process I’ve learnt something about how to develop games in general. From the outset I held back from jumping into producing a lot of maps before we had tweaked and tested the actually combat/gameplay. This is something I learned to be important after making Kingdoms Collide since that game featured many maps that didn’t suit or enhance the game-play  they were simply made based on artistic merits. However, even after recognizing this problem with my processes I still wen’t ahead and made a nice fancy looking level “Ruins of the wolf king” for KR. But now since blocking out and testing these test levels I am finding them 1. A whole heap more fun and 2. A million times faster to modify or iterate to suite what the gameplay needs.

My advice to any new game developer from here would simply be, don’t art-up your levels until the end. Go ahead and model generic props etc. But don’t get decorating or beautifying your maps until they have been thoroughly tried, tested and adjusted while still in easy to manage block form. Why? Because once you place hundreds of grass meshes on your terrain how willing do you think you will be to change the position of a small hill? or how willing would you be to move a wall once it’s been decorated with bricks, moss, paintings, vines etc.

So yes, bad news from all of this, the current “pretty” map will likely also be the least fun. Good news is there will be many more fun and well balanced maps in it’s place.

Meanwhile Paul has been re-coding the player’s movement and rolling code to be more fluid, it’s disappointing having to pause work on exciting things to re-make such low level code, but I think once we show the results everyone will agree that it’s worth it.

Today I figured out how to put particle systems onto meshes and then proceeded to make a few first draft player effects. Check em oot!

For help with achieving this effect check out the link that helped me here: Imbuefx.com

PS: The music is ‘Nova’ by ‘Vonikk’

End of the work day Paul and I have a daily play-test – to feel how our work has affected the gameplay. This time I cut together some of the fun had, to share here;

So as you can probably tell, we have increased the pace of the melee fighting quite substantially. It’s been one reoccurring criticism of the game by many many people so far that the combat looks slow and boring, so we finally got around to doing something about it!
We’re really glad we did too, play-testing the game has become a lot more fun one these speed changes where tweaked right,
tell us what you think of the new pace!

A few things moving along lately, We’ve got a new map in progress. If you remeber Kingdoms Collide you may see that this map is somewhat inspired by the old Survival maps. Looking over some old screenshots from those maps gave me the urge to quickly block together something similar in KR. ‘Powering up’ attacks now has an effect, this was in response to some feedback we got, people said

The sword is too hard to see against the background, I can’t tell which direction enemies are attacking from!

So now the sword will glow and have a charge up effect when performing attacks, making the incoming direction a lot more clear we hope!

Lastly, we’ve made some post processing filters which show the players health, the less health you have the more bloodied the screen will be and the more grey everything will look. Hopefully this takes peoples eyes off the HUD and leaves them free to focus on the game!

This weekend we’ll be taking the game to SwitchLAN in Melbourne for anyone who is willing to try out, so hopefully I’ll be posting again soon with some of the fun/notfun that goes on tomorrow!

It’s been a while since we’ve posted an update, we have been very busy rushing together a  neat build for the PAX Australia Indie showcase. The AIS is our only chance of being at PAX Aus this year so wish us luck!
Now that the rush is over and our build has been submitted I’ve been able to focus on making new assets for KR, starting with these helmets! Tell us which design you like the most!

Working on the KR HUD, These active spell icons now have a fancy clock wipe effect to display cool-down times! It was a pretty tricky effect to achieve, but worth the effort.

Today we did some work on establishing the core menus we need into KR, these are obviously still very basic placeholders, but it’s an achievement to just have the pipeline/workflow sorted out and complete

Today I learnt a bit of visual basic and programmed a simple game launcher

Now that we have this we should be able to easily distribute the game to alpha and beta testers for some online testing (when we have them). The launcher should also help keep everyone on the same version of the game client and prevent unwanted sharing

Paul and I are going to be working especially hard these next couple of weeks to create a tight, playable build. We are planning on submitting KR to the PAX Aus Indie Showcase, it’s our last hope of going to PAX this year but it requires the game be fun enough to impress the judges. God willing, we’ll have something other people can really enjoy very soon!