Merry Prankster Games, by gdunbar

10 Fantasy Fights: Building Tiles

"10 Fantasy Fights" needs a small town for recruiting party members, buying items, etc. So I've started in on getting a tileset ready, and I've got the building tiles done. In the level editor, here is a basic layout:

11) Milestone 5.1 - 10 Fantasy Fights.
a. Look at old feedback:
i. Moved ...

Untitled SENG Game: Now, With More Name!

I've finished my internal Milestone 5 ("Engine Updates"). Yay! The SENG engine is now in good shape for a full-featured game. Oh, there are always more features I could ad...

Untitled SENG Game: Spell Effects

Among other things, I've been mucking around with the spell effect system. I made the code much more flexible and generic, making it easier to make effects with varying appearances. As part of that work, I also spent a little time coming up with a core set...

Links: Economy, Quests, and News

Some interesting links for this week:

Shamus has an interesting article about broken economies in RPGs:

http://www.es...

Untitled SENG Game: Icons!

I've been working on icons for SENG lately; almost done.

One of my philosophies for SENG is to have a minimum of art content, but display it in many ways. In terms of icons, this means using one icon for a variety of different representa...

Links: Assorted

Various links this week, all courtesy of Coyote (http://rampantgames.com/blog). Hey, maybe you should just read his blog instead of mine! (OK, you can read both).

First, a postmortem on Persona 4. In...

Untitled SENG Game: Ten Interesting Fights

In the last couple of days, I wrapped up some last RPG tweaks. Made rogues a little more powerful, adjusted the numbers a little bit; nothing too big.

Next u...

Untitled SENG Game: Audio and Party Chatter

A couple of updates on the game engine. First, I added support for footstep sounds and ambient audio. One of the critiques that I got from the To The World Tree demo (http://www.prankster.com/ttwt) was t...

Links: Randomness and Ultima VII

First, Greg Costikyan has a detailed article on randomness in games (video and otherwise), based on a presentation he made at Austin GDC 2009. Highly recommended; really informative and interesting:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/experi...

Untitled SENG Game: Level Editor

So I finished up the updates to the level editor. Now, let me show off what it can do!

To do this, I'll show how easy it is to make a tower in a grassy field. Let me put a caveat that I don't have any real art or anything, and I don't have a full ...

Links: Design Storytelling, and Procedural Worlds

Couple of links today:

Andrew Vanden Bossche from GameSetWatch has article about storytelling through cutscenes or text exposition, and the often-superfluous nature of stories told in this manner. Good article: