The Burning Plague

[pat]

I've been playing around with combat to make sure that it all works reasonably well so I can move onto other aspects of the game:

http://theburningplague.blogspot.com.au/2013/09/combat-testing-and-balancing.html

I'm still up in the air about whether it's worth doing a pre-alpha release for the ARRP because there's definitely some content there and it's somewhat playable in the state that it's in, but on the other hand I don't want to release a fairly lame skeleton of a game which doesn't do enough to capture people's interest and might in fact deflate people's expectations because they'll feel like they've tried the game out and didn't find a whole lot to it, which is probably right in the state it's in.

[Kyzrati]

Release early, release often.

ARRP is the perfect opportunity to start doing it.

It won't be a huge audience that notices your game at first anyway, just the people who probably would've been interested in the first place. In my experience unless you somehow get HUGE exposure (which you won't at first), indie devs benefit far more from releasing whatever they have. If your game eventually gets good enough that more people start playing it and talking about it, it will naturally attract a greater following. On the other hand, if the game is never developed into a truly "fun" state, then having initially turned a few people off is meaningless, anyway.

[pat]

You've convinced me. I'll put together a release today.

[Kyzrati]

Yay! Then my duty here is done ;p

Found your thread at just the right time, too, and only because this morning I saw a clickthrough to one of my blogs from the first page, and read through more because this project does look appealing.

[pat]

Ok, here's a first release of the game, and I'll write up a short post for the announcement section as well. Windows only executible with no source code for the moment.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zlw8ns0x4eluoel/The%20Burning%20Plague%20v1.zip

What you'll find is a demonstration of the combat systems with a fully working companion, neutral and hostile AI's along with a fully moddable world loading from the files in the /data directory which you're more than welcome to play around with. Creating an entirely new map and series of monster encounters should be really obvious and easy to do.

You might find that there's less point in picking a sorcerer or a priest at this stage because their special abilities aren't included just yet, but then again if you like to look at a picture of a cool looking wizard man instead of a boring fighter man then you can go ahead and do so.

Because there's no randomised content, a lot of the plot I have written so far has been stripped out for this release because I want to save that for a proper release in the future, but there's a few bits and pieces left in so you can see how the system is supposed to work.

Commands are keypad (no vi-keys) and that's about it right now. Press 'c' for character info. There's a few more things like a look command and a targetting system for ordering your allies into battle which I've removed for now because they're a bit buggy with the recently graphics update.

EDIT: oops, vi-keys actually do work, I just forgot that I put them in!

[Kyzrati]

Wandered around for a bit and while there wasn't a whole lot to do right now except get allies following me and killing the few enemies I ran into (*lots* of misses), I can see how this could be pretty fun with some story and more complex interactions. Nice atmosphere to it.

[Paul Jeffries]

This is pretty nice so far.  The presentation is great - it maintains the old-school feel but is still quite clear and inviting.  I definitely see a lot of potential here.

Some crits/suggestions:

- In the 'narration' messageboxes, the fact that the characters have black backgrounds but the spaces are transparent makes it a bit visually confusing.  I would say either give the message box a black background or the characters transparent backgrounds.
- The message log is quite verbose and during combat it can be difficult to find the result of your own attack in amongst everything else going on.  I would suggest either making your own actions a different colour to make them easier to spot or drawing a line in the messagebox to denote the start of the current turn.
- Slight AI bug: after the first combat my companions stopped following me and instead decided to hang around next to the pile of Kobold corpses we'd just created.  I had to go and swap places with one of them to get them to 'unstick' and start following me again.  At a guess I'd say this is because enemies don't get unmarked as obstacles when killed for your pathfinding routine.
- The 'Orc Warrior swaps places with Ogre' etc. messages seem to happen if I'm anywhere near them regardless of whether or not I can actually see them, which gives me unfair advance warning of what kinds of enemies are around.  Ideally you should only display this information when I can already see the enemy.

[pat]

Thanks for the feedback.

I've noticed that with the message boxes as I put up big walls of text, it definitely gets cluttered. I'll fix it.

The combat messages will definitely need to be cleaned up. Admittedly they're at their simplest for debugging reasons, but cleaning them up and consolidating as many messages into a single as possible is on the agenda. And the swaps places messages will probably go in their entirety and again are still in for debugging reasons. The reason they pop up like that is because AI's are switched off unless you reach a certain distance from them and that's when the messages start appearing. They will certainly be removed.

That AI bug was something I made tonight. The companion AI was broken previously in a slightly different way in that every companion followed the player automatically which wasn't quite right - one of them is supposed to be a follower of the other and that one then follows the player. So I fixed that and obviously stuffed something else up where they don't properly move on from their recently deceased target. I did the same thing with shifting them around a pile of dead kobolds to get them moving again.

[pat]

That AI bug was so annoying. It was one of those things which I had made a mess of ages ago but for some inexplicable reason I had made a second error in my AI code which covered up the bug. So the AI was supposed to check for blocking objects (being living creatures, amongst other things) before looking to move or swap places, but I stupidly forgot to ever check to see if the object we were checking actually blocked the space. And to compound the error, my AI code never actually went down that branch due to an unrelated error so the bug never showed up until I changed something else and then I was wondering why my companions would never walk over the non-blocking body of their fallen enemies, argh.

[Paul Jeffries]

Yep, that sounds like roguelike development to me!

[Vanguard]

Is there a way to get healed in this?

[pat]

Not yet. Healing is going to be a priest class power, perhaps implemented as a spell which takes three turns to cast so it can't be spammed in combat. I think I might also have it require some kind of skill check (probably knowledge) if an enemy is in line of sight so that healing in combat isn't overpowered. Out of combat it should always succeed so it isn't annoying.

I expect there'll also be npc characters who heal as well, but I've got to write the framework for that and write the ability to link that to plot points, ie. the village mystic will only heal you after you have recovered the farmer's scythe from the rat infested abandoned barn and returned it to his widow. There's a kind of hidden journal already implemented which will have key words added to it to record your progress with things like this and I'll be trying make all those aspects of the game fully transparent and editable through the plain text data files.

[pat]

After a bit of a hiatus, I returned to work and finished the character creation process with attributes and skill customisation.

[pat]

Character creation complete and priests can now heal and also cause weird bugs where the newly-healed still look like a pile of bones even though they're back on their feet.

[jim]

Looking really good, man! I'm excited.