Off the Snails

Born to fish, forced to work ○ Art ○ Code ○ Mischief ○ Personal blog of debugfrog

[offthesnails]

[offthesnails]

A recent project of mine has been a little RPG game in Unity (more to come on this,) and one of the big parts of developing a game with lots of content like an RPG is dealing with absolutely humungous amounts of ✨Data✨

One such source of spicy, spicy data is Dialogue - I'm a big fan of games like Stardew and Harvest Moon, where talking to NPCs reveals their character, their personality, etc. It's immersion breaking when an NPC start spurting repetitive dialogue, so I've set up a system where there's dialogue that's event driven, conditional and very varied.

But, with so much dialogue, there's a lot to get bogged down by, and I want a nice lil interface I can use to write my dialogue, without writing it directly into a json file.

So - Dialogue Crafter is a little standalone app I'm working on using PyQt in Python, which lets me load up my dialogue data and edit it in (what will eventually be,) a node based format - I can connect dialogue in chains, add choices and branching dialogue, and organise dialogues by character, by season, by purpose, by relationship level with the talker, the list goes on.

Even in it's rough and gnarly state (note the papyrus header) it's been a big help for parsing dialogue and visualising all that data.

A challenge - take a shot every time this post says the word "dialogue"

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A ✨throwback✨ to a prototype I made for a top down 2D trading RPG, in which all the assets were hand-drawn and inked on paper. Started this one during (you guessed it!) the month of Inktober, maybe around 2019ish!

The gameplay itself was pretty clunky and felt very stiff and boring, so I don't think I could do anything with it in the form it was in, but I really liked inking all those dinky lil item icons hehe. I like to think I can code a bit better than I could then, so itching for a revisit.. (I'd just gotten my cat Charles at the time I started working on it, so the player character is a little dedication to my boy)

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I've been pondering the current UI for my card-collecting-roguelike-city-builder game (need to come up with a name for this,) but more specifically, the UI:

^ The current UI (am not a fan)

At the moment, the game has three main HUD components - First is the cards in your hand you can pick from. Second is the area you drag cards to in order to play them, and the third is the grid space you build buildings onto to grow your city.

I want to keep it to one screen, bc I'm going for a board game vibe. But, it's a lot of info for one screen, and I think that's what I hate about the current layout.

So, hence my pondering.

^ A more streamlined UI I was considering (not enough info)

I considered making the grid the main component of the HUD, but then I kept coming back to the question of where the card-play area (and the necessary text that prompts the activity each turn) could go.

THEN I made the extremely good decision to ask my partner what she thought. And her suggestion was to layer the UI vertically. Card hand panel at the bottom, card-play area in the middle, city-building area up top, with a side view as opposed to a grid view.

This is, as is a lot my partner says, an incredible idea. And so I sketched it up:

^ Vertically layered UI (shall be pursuing)

It'll require some re-jigging of the project structure, particularly with regards to how I handle buildings, but the script that define the way the grid worked wasn't the best thing I've ever coded, so I won't be sorry to toss it out in favour of this setup.

Now I just need to settle on the visual style of the illustration...

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Time for a ✨ Game Prototype ✨

For last year's Ludum Dare Game Jam, I made the prototype for a deck building turn-based card game with a roguelike flavour, in which you play as the ruler of a kingdom of bunnies.

Each turn, you're presented with a situation/problem to make a ruling on, and you can play approve/deny cards to advance turns, or you can play effect cards that bolster other stats, draw additional cards, skip events etc etc.

Every choice you make has an effect on two primary stats - your money, and the approval rating among your subjects. Either reaches 0, and you lose. There's a lot more nuance though, as you can also trigger game status effects, like plague, civil war, among other fun ones.

Last thing of note, you can also collect building cards and, when played in your lil kingdom grid, will be built. These give per-turn effects and can really shape your strategy - for example, building barracks improves the safety of your people and can help prevent war breaking out, but they also decreases happiness! Farms increase both happiness and money! Lotsa different ways to play

When you run out of cards or otherwise trigger a lose state, you can tweak your deck and restart again, now playing as your last ruler's descendant. Your buildings remain between rounds (of course, provided they weren't burnt down by angry bunny citizens at the end of your previous round, which is always a possibility...)

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Spent some time today thinking about an expansive open world RPG set in tribal centaur lands. Plays out just like a regular RPG in the style of recent Assassin's Creed and Far Cry games - ie, a map populated with quests ranging from narrative-driven, resource/collection driven, side quests, etc etc.

I think having mounts/vehicles in the aforementioned games changes the way the player experiences the map, and so i'd imagine if the mount was inbuilt into the player character itself, it'd make for a pretty interesting challenge in environmental design (read: speed is a given, so gonna have lotsa wide open space, etc etc )

I'd imagine the map also containing a couple of centaur tribes, which maybe the player can join, trade with, parley with, etc. These factions have fluid relationships with one another - sometimes they may be at peace and trading with one another, and other times they may be at war. So, your good relationship with a faction may cause tension with another faction. I love a good dynamically changing world. (there's an indie game called Pine that does this really nicely, but I also have Mount and Blade in mind)

This kinda randomness allows for a bit of a Rimworld flavour to the player experience - unexpected things happening to further a narrative that's unique to each player.

I'd imagine a story being something along the lines of reclaiming an ancestral homeland, uniting tribes, etc etc. But more importantly, it would have extensive capacity for character customisation (think customisation of both pelt of horse, warpaint, etc, as well as customisation of the human half), because at the end of the day, I was a barbie-dress-up-game kid, and I can't pretend it didn't inform my taste in video games. Sue me.

[offthesnails]

[offthesnails]

I have a week off between jobs, and I'm spending it appropriately (making many 3D cartoon versions of my cat, and putting them all in a thunderdome to bounce off each other)

[offthesnails]

Life drawing

[offthesnails]

We are here to make mischief