  Zelda-Diablo: UI main action HUD | 
Posted - 10/28/2005 7:24:26 PM | so it's been decided that i'm going to go with a Zelda: Wind Waker / Minish Cap type of HUD. you're going to have floating button representations hovering over the gameplay, with action words or symbols hovering over the buttons. its a great system to steal.
right now i'm wondering what other things the player needs immediate access to. so far, s/he'll know what each button does (some are context-sensitive and adapt to the current situation). that's great, but you need more than just that. obviously you're going to need HP/MP representations. i'm not going to use the zelda health method, as i need something more like diablo on this. i don't like how much space the spheres use on diablo, i need something more streamlined. location is also important. the button hovers are going to be at the top - likely corner based. i'll get back to this once we have all of our hud parts defined.
the quickbelt in diablo won't be shown until you've used the R+down trigger to open it. the same goes with the quickspell/skill area. we don't need to show money on the HUD all the time, so squirreling it away in the inventory like diablo did makes sense. we don't need any of the buttons that diablo's got on its hud, because that stuff is all accessed through the submenus using start. there won't be a stamina meter, so that isn't needed.
the rupee counter in zelda isn't needed, we went over that. consumable items like bombs and arrows are counted on the items themselves, and is shown on the action symbol. (in inventory, stackable items have counters showing on their picture unlike in diablo). i don't see anything else you'd need immediate access to. it would be convenient for the skill symbols to have counters on them showing how many times you have left to use them according to your MP (or charges in that case), like a bow would.
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| lack of updates | 
Posted - 10/28/2005 4:17:20 PM | now that i'm getting back into the groove after my injury, i find i don't have alot of time outside of karate and work. thankfully i don't have a girlfriend to muck up the rest of my spare time. i've been playing alot of zelda: wind waker lately and off-and-on thinking about my game.
i'm working on a project design document that will outline various aspects of the project. i'm not sure how maintainable it will be - it's going to be ever-changing due to the fact that i don't konw what i need from everything just yet. i want to set up percentages so i know what point i'm at. the idea is to have a place to go when i'm not sure what i should be doing next - just open up the design and see what needs to be worked on.
aside from that, i don't have much to talk about besides life, and mine isn't all that exciting.
todo: move journal header to the webpage and get some more focused reminders up there. there's too much to just glance at and be reminded of. [EDIT: done and done!]
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| Tuesday, October 25, 2005 |
| Zelda-Diablo Input | |
Posted - 10/25/2005 1:01:10 AM | without further ado, lets get back to the nitty-gritty.
i've been thinking lately on how to do the belt and spellbook hotkeying, and i've realized that i don't exactly know how i've got the joystick set up.
let's start with the basics: gameboy advance button setup. i've got a ps2 joystick hooked to my pc through a to-usb converter. the button mapping may not be obvious, so let's go over how i'm doing that.
basically, the L and R buttons map to L1 and R1. i stick with the d-pad, start and select. then we have B and A, which are mapped to X and O. its a comfortable way for me to lay my thumb across buttons, like i have since the NES joystick was around.
from here, the d-pad moves the player. obviously.
select will toggle the automap on and off.
start will bring up the inventory screen. from the inventory screen, L and R will move through the various other screens (charsheet, spellbook, quests) and wrap back around to the inventory. select could bring up the main menu from here. i'll go into detail on these screens after i've looked at the four other buttons.
L is probably best used as the item pickup button. while in the item pickup selection menu, pressing start should allow you to open the inventory so you can place the item manually if you choose.
R is likely to be used as the quick-select toggle. this part is where things might seem a little complicated. so far the idea is to press R to bring up a small menu, and you select from belt, spellbook, or weapons using one of three directions on the d-pad. if you've picked the belt, you use the d-pad to move along the belt that just popped up and press either A or B to use the item immediately. if you've picked the spellbook, you use the d-pad to move amongst the spells/skills you know and press A or B to set it to that button. if you've picked the weapons, you then pick one of the two weapons sets you've got equipped. you press either A or B and it gets set to that button. at any time during the selection toggle, you press R again (or release R? give this as an option) to get out.
at this point, its probably obvious that A and B simply perform the action you've set to them from the R button screen. if i were to go with the above setup, i'm going to make sure everything is obvious to the user. what needs to be obvious? for one, what the buttons all do. in zelda, the buttons are mapped out somewhere on the screen, and what you've got things set to are shown on the button. in minish cap, the R button had a word over it that told you what you'd do if you pressed it. the other two would have the item you had selected, hovering over the button. it didn't show L or start or select, but those weren't important enough and would likely have just cluttered things.
so its important that we have the UI show us what the important buttons are going to do. in diablo, the skills were shown at the bottom. the belt was too, but the hotkeys were ready to go - in this case we don't have hotkeys to the belt, so we don't need to show it at all times.
imagine if, when we pressed R, a quicky menu dropped down at the top of the screen:
+-----------------------------------------------+
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| [weapon sets]-o-[spellbook] |
| | |
| [belt] |
| |
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| ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ |
it would probably be a little more graphical than that, but it shouldn't be a stretch for you to get the idea. from there, you'd move the d-pad to the option you wanted, and pressed either A or B to move into the option (alternatively, just pressing the direction could select it?). the quicky menu would go away, and depending on which one you picked, you'd get one of the menus to slide on. pressing down would get the belt to slide up. i've already discussed this.. but we would probably want to have a message just over the belt to tell the user to press A or B to use the selected item. if there's empty slots at the start of the belt, the cursor should be moved over to the first item available.
pressing left would have the equipped item screen come up (on the left?) and the cursor would only be able to move between the weapon set tabs. we'd need to indicate for you to press A or B to set it - perhaps even darkening the whole inventory panel except for the weapons and set tabs. a message somewhere nearby (just above or just below), in the darkened region could tell you just that "press (A) or (B) to assign".
pressing right would have the quickspell menu come up (diablo1).. what about in the case of diablo2, with the skill tree? it wouldn't be particularly quick to have to use the tabs to pick between the skill sheets and then go onto the sheets and nav to the skill you wanted. it wouldn't be especially quick to nav through the quickspell menu in diablo1 either, if you had all the spells available. this one needs even more thought. i'd guess we needed to have a special 'spell belt' setup for this one, that mimics the simplicity of the belt interface. you were allowed what, 8 hotkeys for spells, and later in diablo2 - 12 hotkeys. a 2x or 3x 4 slot array would be pretty quick to select from.
now that i've gone through this some, i've got some changes to make. for one, the starting R-menu should probably look more like:
+-----------------------------------------------+
| |
| [quickspells] |
| | |
| o-[weapon sets] |
| | |
| [belt] |
| |
| |
| ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ |
where the quickspell array will drop from the top, and the inventory will slide on from the right side, as all subscreens will likely do. that would feel more natural, i think.
holding in R for the quick menu and then pressing a direction, then having a panel slide on - you wouldn't want to have to hang onto R to go through your selection process from there. having to pressing it again to close the panel.. that seems to make the most sense to do.
i have to have to drop this here, but i've gotta get some sleep for work tomorrow. i'll go over the subscreens in my next entry. we've pretty much got the whole UI set up now. the subscreens are pretty straightforward, i'm pretty sure.
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| Zelda-Diablo Reassessment | 
Posted - 10/24/2005 11:58:05 PM | well, profound as my realization was yesterday(?), it doesn't change the fact that i just want a simple treasure-hutning game that frees me from keyboard and mouse hunching. its something i'd want to be able to port to a gameboy advance (though it would probably never happen) and as such, i want to keep to those input and video restrictions. multiplayer is certainly something i'd love to have in it, but its not an absolute must (noone'd be playing THIS but me ^_^).
i'd honestly like to keep to the simple graphics Zelda: Link's Awakening brought, but it will likely not cut it for a game like this. you're going to need a better view range in this though. having a swarm of monsters attack would be a masterful pain if you didn't have enough time to make a plan of attack/escape because you saw them too late. i suppose there are ways around it, like having a camera system move the view ahead in the direction you were facing.
i guess its the simplicity i'm really aiming for. simple controls, simple graphics system, simple simple simple.
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| webspace | |
Posted - 10/24/2005 11:04:14 PM | i remembered i've got webspace i can use for a homepage. i'm hand-editing the html, and i really didn't try very hard to get anything in there yet.. but here it is.
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| form vs function | 
Posted - 10/24/2005 6:16:44 PM | i've had an epiphany.
for many years of my life, i've lived by "function > form". even now i can point out decisions i've made without giving any real forethought to them. as a simple example, i can turn around and see two minitables arranged haphazardly with a tv and two consoles on them, with various games stacked on and under. the tables are holding the tv and systems where i want them: function. they're very messy looking: form. its ugly, but it works great for me.
i used to believe i held the same ground with video games. in fact, if ever presented with a situation on irc to give my opinion, i usually took the chance to voice it. but, is that how i really feel about it? i don't buy new video game systems as soon as they come out - i don't even have an xbox yet. when people tell me how great the graphics for such-and-such-a-system are, i usually scoff and start talking about the gc/xbox/ps2 and how i beleive the games are what make the killer system.
the fact of the matter is that just like everybody else, i'm not grabbed by a game until it visually grabs me. in most cases, its a screenshot in a mag or on a site, sometimes its a compiled avi. i actually rented La Pucelle: Tactics because of their website's frontend music - it grabbed me - and then i wanted to see what the fuss was about. (actually i blame Penny-Arcade for advertising it in the first place)
in any case, sometimes thats all we have to judge a game by. head over to the showcase to see that for yourself. sometimes i won't download a game that's ugly simply for that fact. "a game that's ugly can't be fun (unless someone says it is)"
so why am i talking about all of this? well, for one, i'm admonishing myself. there aren't many things worse than hypocrasy in my mind, and here i am being one of the biggest ones of them all. for two, i need to figure out how that affects my perception about my own projects. i know that i often get sidetracked by the visual representation my code reflects. examples: getting the collision rectangle in just the right position, having a multi-facing sprite face all directions before letting it move, and trying to set a graphical style before the game design is even done.
as you can see at the top of this journal, i'm always looking for ways to keep my focus on a project. as i move forward, having realizations like the above can help me get somewhere - if i can figure out a way to harness the new knowledge.
so what do i need to do with this new fact?
as i code, i should almost be forcing myself to produce really ugly sprites to use ("programmer art") as i move along in coding and testing. its important that i have constructed things in such a way as to allow for expansion of certain fields, such as animation upgrading from simple sprite structures. but when you start out, you gotta figure out what's most important.
i've been putting off 3d programming for quite a while now because "3d graphics don't make a game fun". while it's true, it's certainly not always true. you can't make a very fun fps game without 3d graphics. not that i'm suggesting i make an fps, but that some gametypes that ARE fun REQUIRE 3d graphics. 3d graphics can make a project more complicated - again, not always true. even though i can't model worth beans, it doesn't mean i can't resort to well-drawn billboard spriting - given specific restrictions on camera angle and whatnot. i don't need to have the latest LOD-mesh generation algorithm if i limit the size of my fields. and i shouldn't be holding myself back from good looking 3d graphics, because they don't always have to be complicated to look good.
i have to start getting back to that most important root i follow: "function > form". forget about what it looks like now - get it to do what you want it to do. after that, you can make it look as great as you want. the data needs to be left until the backend is ready for it.
let's hope i can keep this in mind.
[EDIT: had to rearrange a bit, and add to it. bleh.]
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| Saturday, October 22, 2005 |
| journal header | 
Posted - 10/22/2005 7:57:59 PM | i've realized a while back that i need a way to remind myself about the things i need to focus on. i just realized last night at work that i could do that by changing the header of my journal - i look at my journal often, and having to see the focus every time i open it would help to keep me on track. or so i would think. let's find out, shall we?
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| Thursday, October 20, 2005 |
| zelda diablo mockups | |
Posted - 10/20/2005 12:17:03 AM | i'm not happy with zelda's gameboy arrow shooting, and if i'm going to make a crappy gameboy zelda diablo, i need to fix this one up for real.
the problem in zelda is that you can only shoot your arrow in one of four directions. now, i can see why they did this; its a simple interface - you press the button and you shoot the arrow in whatever direction you were facing. but it's no good for me. i often want to shoot on angles; it would often be helpful to do so. in a game where you're going to rely on your arrows (as the rogue would in diablo) you need to be sure they're effective, and they're really limited in zelda.
on the diablo side of things, though it was fixed up in diablo2, the arrow collision detection was shitty at best. there's no real need to explain this one in great detail, if the target wasn't on one of the tiles the arrow travelled along, there was no hit. it woulda been a little more difficult to try to do pixel-perfect on this, because its a tile-based location deal.
the idea originally was to go with a crystal chronicles magic type deal. press the arrow button and hold it to get an aiming cursor, release to fire. i like the idea of it, it lets you have nearly any angle you want to fire your arrows, but after playing a bit with the rogue and thinking it over, you wouldn't be able to fire alot of arrows very fast if you had to line up the cursor over and over.
so you'd press the button down, and the targetting cursor would appear under you. you'd use the d-pad to move it around in the range you were allowed, and when you let go, it would shoot the arrow. if you needed to realign quickly, you could move in the direction you wanted to start it at and then press the button; the cursor would start at its maximum distance in that direction, and you could reposition it from there a little more quickly.
even with that, though, you can't rapidfire like you can with the rogue. you hold in shift and start clicking everywhere and you machinegun arrows all over hell. though it isn't as obvious to do, let's say instead you hold in the button for the cursor as before, and press the other button each time you wanted to shoot an arrow. hmm. i really don't want this to be too complicated, and the two button method is sorta that way. suppose you pressed the button and held it to get the cursor, and released it to shoot, but the cursor stayed onscreen. you press and hold to move the cursor again, and let go to shoot yet another arrow. you could just quickly press and release the button for more arrows in the same direction. to cancel the arrow shooting, you could press the other button. if you moved around while in targetting mode, you would keep your arrow ready and face that direction until you cancelled, like in LoZ: minish cap / four swords.
i think the arrowhead should have a clip area for it, 8x8 standard, and if that overlaps a monster clip, there's a hit. having the whole arrow checked would be wierd - if the tail collided, it would look wrong if the head wasn't colliding at all. we might want to go with collision circles in this too, but if i'm going for the gameboy feel, i'll be doing rects. also, if i'm doing the gameboy feel, i'm going to want to have 16 direction sprites for the arrow. 8 won't quite do justice. the bow should have 8dirs, and an arrow/no-arrow version. we're probably pushing the limits of the gameboy by doing this, but meh. it looks like they load srites off the cart on an as-needed basis anyhow, so it shouldn't be too bad. in order to get the arrow-sticking visual to work, it might even be easier to have the arrows stored as two 8x8 sprites, and overlap them for the in-flight, then put the tail where the head was when there's a hit and stick it to the target sprite for a limited time.
it probably won't matter if we do the two 8x8 overlapping vs just going with 16x16 sprites for each angle. the gameboy hardware stores all sprites as 8x16 or 8x8 only, there's no mixing.. so it would just be easier to make the rotated 16x16s and just use them. we'll need to have the clip rect set for each one though, but thats just a little extra work for those.
here's a mockup of the above design:
[EDIT: whoops! i messed up! the button needs to be held in, to move the cursor. i'll fix that up soon]
its pretty dirty looking, but thats what you get when you don't do it programmatically. still, it gets the idea across. watch the little controller overlay in the bottom left to see what i'm saying. i didn't show link moving around while the targetting cursor was ready, but it's probably a pretty easy thing to visualise.
what would be next? not sure. gotta think about this for a bit.
[EDIT: we've got..
- item screen
- map generation
- AI
- 'thing' interaction
.. still to do, at the very least. the item screen is next on my list.]
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| Tuesday, October 18, 2005 |
| diablo1 chibi/sd rogue sketch | 
Posted - 10/18/2005 9:21:40 PM | 
well, its certainly not much. but i finally did **a** sd/chibi sketch. and it didn't turn out badly. i'm going to need to do more to get a better feel for the sizing and stuff. hopefully i can make some quick sprites in this vein to use instead of the crappy gameboy link ones. i'll be able to make 8dirs and whatnot after i get some practice.
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| zelda-diablo mockups | |
Posted - 10/16/2005 5:49:36 AM | i guess i'll add this one for posterity.
 
this one's a little ugly, but it shows something i was wondering about. how far should the spear reach? we definitely need it to stab out further than the sword can.. the sword can reach out 2x units - should we double that to 4x for the spear, or just go with a 'better' 3x? the 4x looks too wierd to me. also, the thought of someone using a spear and sliding it all the way out to the end and then back.. it seems wrong. i know the spear's just appearing when link uses it above, but its more likely that my sprites will be visibly carrying the spear in the end.
i'll do an angled version next of the 3x reach, and then we'll get to the bow.
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| Saturday, October 15, 2005 |
| zelda-diablo mockup | |
Posted - 10/15/2005 7:16:21 PM | lets get right to the mockup.
in this mockup we are attacking in 3 directions. first, we're attacking to the NE. the second attack is due East. then we do a third attack to the SE. (i've looped it, of course) even with only 8 angles for the sword sprite, we should be able to do this fairly easily.
one of the things that bothers me most about alot of 2d action adventures is that they only do things in 4 directions. in minish cap, you have enough coverage with the sword strokes, but with many of the other weapons, 4 directions is simply not enough. if you can move in 8 directions, you should be able to act in 8 directions.
the mockup would be more obvious if i did the thrust, instead of the stroke, in the same directions to show off the angles. the spear class standard thrust should be able to be done in 8 directions as well. i'll do the spear next.
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| more zelda-diablo mockups | |
Posted - 10/15/2005 6:15:32 PM | these ones aren't particularly special.
this one shows a basic sword stroke. i made the mockup to show the general idea for the arc. dmg zelda does a 90' quadrant arc, and i'm quite dissatisfied with it.
this one shows a possible addition to the dmg zelda fighting core - the thrust. its generally going to be quicker to poke someone with a quick thrust. i pretty much ripped this idea right out of Final Fantasy Adventure (Seiken Dentetsu 1)
next i want to show 8dir attacking, spears, and bows.
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| zelda-diablo mockups | |
Posted - 10/15/2005 5:08:14 PM | in an effort to help motivate me (as well as give form to some of my ideas) i figured i'd throw together some mock-ups. i basically ripped some screenies and tilesets and played around a bit with mspaint and psp3.
in this mockup, we have some basic fighting. its not really anything special, but its hard to get a shot of you striking something, so i had to do a little work. was sorta practice too.
in this mockup, we've killed the octoroks in the same spot and now we have a cluster of items. if you don't want to pick them all up, you need a way to pick the particular item you want. in fact, i don't imagine i'll have any automatic pickup of items (gold/rupees aside, of course) and you'll need to move to a group and perform the PickUp action. if there's an ambiguity as to which item the player wanted, a list like the above would pop up and you'd have to select which you wanted.
i need some weapon usage mockups now ^_^
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| LoZ: Minish Cap | 
Posted - 10/2/2005 11:45:40 PM | so i just beat minish cap. i've got alot of thoughts on the stuff done in the game, and its time for a brain dump.
item equipping.
well, they've brought back any item equipping on the buttons. i was happy to see it again - being able to put the sword on either button (or unequip altogether) was great. but they took away item combining! in LoZ:LA, you could (say) equip the bombs and the bow, and shoot bomb-arrows at faraway targets. using sword and sheild buttons simultaneously, you could defend front attacks (like octorok rocks) and bump away enemies, if you didn't poke them with the sword.
on the other hand, there were attacks in MC that you could only do if you had certain items equipped. for instance, the downthrust attack could only be done with the sword and cape. then there's the sword and boots dash attack.
proper sword arcing.
along with 4S and LttP, you now cover about 180' arc in front of yourself. in the gb/gbc games, you had a crappy 90' quadrant-only attack, and for some reason two of the direction attacks were the same quadrant. that meant you had an area you couldn't attack into. good to see this covered.
all other attack ranges.
again they chose to have a 4-direction attack system. man, that really cramps my style. for some things, like block-pushing puzzles or the digging claws, i can understand that you'd only want to do things in 4 directions. but shooting my arrows in only one of 4 directions? 8 directions is even too limited in that respect, but its better than 4. same goes for the gust jar and any of the other ranged items. come on! you can do 8 directions without adding hardly any extra animation.
items are still useless.
you get a total of 12 useable items in the game, not counting the bottles. of those 12 items, the sword, boomerang, and bow are the only reasonably useful items. the sheild and cape are marginally useful, but not really. it would be wrong to not supply a sheild, but i only used it against the darknuts. if you need to avoid a ranged attack, just move. then there's the boots and ocarina, and they're only useful for moving around the world quickly. that means 3 of 12 items are useful.
the 'useless' items are useless in my mind because there is only a small number of situations where they're actually put to use. against some monsters you have to use the gust jar to get them to a state where you can use your sword on them. other monsters need you to use the sheild to flip them, and then you can attack them with your sword. at least they didn't overdo item forcing. if i had to use the gust jar on 1/2 of the enemies in the game, i'd be kinda pissed.
kinstone puzzles.
well, i'm not exactly sure how to give this an overall rating. you run around and find a crapload of kinstone peices, and then try to find people to match them up with. the first problem is that you eventually run out of people to match them with. there's a specific number of times you can match up kinstones, and when you've found the last matchup, you're all done. just another puzzle, right?
second problem is, why do all of these people have kinstone peices and no matches? on the flip side, why can't you ever find matching peices yourself? then, why can't you find an infinite amount of gold monsters? they only ever drop money, so who cares about them? they're just an interesting thing to find.
its nice that they tell you things about them as you play through the game. you don't know anything about them when you start, and by the end, you should have learned enough about them to know exactly how they work.
the map.
its is pretty nice. you get to zoom in on the particular region you're in, and plan a route through it. on top of that, if you matched kinstone peices, and you forget where they spawned the thinger, it puts a marker on the map for you. getting around the map isn't terribly hard either, once you get the ocarina and have the wind markers open.
non-item abilities.
you meet various trainers as you work through the game that will give you new abilities. its nice to be able to make use of these without having to equip an item to do them, even though most of them are sword techniques. there are 8 techniques to learn, and i use a bunch of them regularly - the beam, the spin attack, and the roll-thrust. having a variety of moves is something that really does make a difference. too bad you couldn't lock down your direction and have a variety of attacks at your disposal, like in OOT.. side strokes, and forward thrust.
i'll wrap it up here. those are the Big Ones for me right now.
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