Company News
In company news, we are happy to welcome Matt McCullar to the team. Mike and I decided to bring him in to help with a free monthly game that we're starting up soon (not The Lost Chapters, a different, smaller web-based game.) Matt is a talented writer and programmer, so he will do a great job of heading that project as well as a welcome addition on future projects.
Seeking Imagination
The project has had a little bit of a change in direction. Originally we were aiming for a bit of a Zelda-esque game: mild combat, epic boss battles, small set of items, puzzle-centric. However, this doesn't really mix that well with the storyline or what we were actually envisioning.
I would still categorize the game as an action-adventure game, but with some RPG elements. It is going to have:
- World-map combat (similar to Zelda, just a little less mild)
- A small set of stats - attack (melee combat effectiveness), defense (health and physical damage protection), magic (magic damage) and dexterity (ranged combat effectiveness), which you will be able to affect via leveling up, the items you equip and potions
- Lots of items - food, potions, melee weapons, ranged weapons, armor and tools.
- Lots of crafting - cooking, alchemy, blacksmithing, etc.
UI Change
Due to the change in design, we've also switched up the UI. We're using a standard health bar now, instead of hearts, we've added an XP bar, gold display and a place to put the character's avatar. Here's a screenshot of it:
We can't agree on a layout and I know others aren't going to be able to, so there will be three choices: four corners, centered across the top and centered across the bottom.
Local Multiplayer Dropped
I'm not sure if you watched my video from last week, but due to the way that gamepads are handled in either Tao or OpenGL, we're going to have to drop local multiplayer for everything except the OUYA. Basically the issue is that when a second gamepad is connected to the system the IDs get messed up in the library. This results in calls to GetState(PlayerIndex.One) to report the state of controller two and GetState(PlayerIndex.Two) to report the state of controller one. I figured that I could get around this using a hack, but I then ran into the issue that if I disconnected controller two at this point, controller one would still try to report the state as if it was controller two and resulted in major defects. The IsConnected was also not being report corrrectly.
Originally I assumed these issues were related to MonoGame, but I ran into the same issue when trying to use SFML.Net; the only library that seems to report the information correctly is XNA. The general census that I've received is that local multiplayer on non-console systems isn't very important (networked multiplayer was obviously more important), so we have decided to drop it and I will start implementing network-based multiplayer once I have finished the initial pass of the prototype.
That's about all that I can think of at the moment. I've spent most of my day writing down ideas, so my brain is kind of shot at the moment. Thanks for tuning in and we'll see you next week!
