A few updates this week. Spent most of my development time working to release another game that I have been working on: Crank Blaster [link to release post] [Full and demo game available from itch.io]
Started working on a missions system that will give the player some concrete tasks to do to help learn about some of the options in game. Also some popups with descriptions that only appear the first time encountering something, for example the first time in home town or first time in a foreign town.
I’ve had some good feed back from a play tester and have a list of improvements to work through.
I’ve got the AI for the families working better, tested it out and it seems to work well. I’ve added some new missions for the player to complete to learn about the game. I’ve also added arrows to the main menu in the town to show when you can scroll for more info. I’ve added a castle to the home town. The play can use the castle to rest and recover health, and spend money to upgrade the castle. As you upgrade the castle the healing works better and you get a better looking castle.
Family menu has current priority, and lists requests.
Replaced Blacksmith system with simplified salary system.
Family AI will buy production items if it can afford even if focused on food not production
New Game Menu instead of options on title screen
Game hints on or off at start of game
Save game code uses yield in case of long save times
Home town and family transfers need to be confirmed like in foreign town
New missions and reward types for missions
Sent latest version out to a friend to check out this week. Worked on the playbit system to see if I could get it working with this game. Here is a comparison of how it looks so far (some visual changes from converting the playbit mp4 to gif) (boxes drawn around sprites for debug). Quite a few glitches and issues to still work through still.
Last week I was working some more on the playbit code and have made good progress. I have a game that will for the most part run as expected. I still have a few issues with graphics, but have implemented the keyboard function to the game. (Keyboard placeholder image, but you use the keyboard to type)
Have added multiple world segment system to allow larger maps. Nearest neighbour map segments will be visible.
Move the history log from (B) button to a option in the hometown. B button now opens playermenu, and (A) button used to enter towns or gather resources.
Added a compass that will point you in the direction of where you need to go for your quest. Updated it to allow you to choose a target for your compass. Current quest, home town or nearest foreign town.
Game play updates: compass works nicely in a cave, and current weapon or armour or battle item amounts are shown when buying in the armoury.
Under the hood updates: Fixes to map glitches, save game issues, improved coroutine yield, and working on a better system for the family AI. The AI is proving tricky, previous setup the family would buy and sell food which is just a waste of money.
Added details of current weapons/armour/battle items to armoury when buying
Added separate target for compass when in a cave (exit or treasure)
Improved yield function to allow background processing with minimal slow down
Fixed cave saving
Fixed world map neighbours appearing in cave
Working on improved family AI. Trying to have the family predict the benefit of each choice.
Last week was a busy week for me, and I didn’t get much time to work the the game. I am still working on the family AI predicting the outcome of their choices.
I think I’ve got the family AI system working well. I’ve also added in the potential to have grandparents in a family. To prevent all children moving away when there isn’t enough land and then everyone dying of old age, the last child to marry will have their parents move in with them. Here is an example of a family with grandparents. Grandparents are not currently listed in the family name list.
Minor updates this week. Adding an advisor to the player menu which will let you know some of the things your town could use. Not fully working yet, but here is what it looks like.
Got the advisor working and I have released my first beta version. I’ve started a thread for comments and the beta version can be downloaded there: Thousand Year Ruler Beta
Had a two week break for Easter while the kids were home. I’ve been busy with work but got a bit of time. Feed back from my beta told me that the game was running very slowly. I’ve changed the tile style code, which determine what a tree tile should look like based on the surrounding tiles, to use bitwise operations instead of for loops and arrays, it seems to be about 8 to 10 times faster, but not fully implemented yet. I’m also going to have to do some other major rewrites for speed purposes.
Worked on tile system for the map last week, which should be quicker. Tiles are grouped in sections of 30 wide by 1 high to match the system used for tile style and only nearby ones are added to sprite list. Previous system had large tilemap for the whole world. Here is a testing example. I’ve set the limit to be too small to show the changes for testing purposes.
Lots of fixes of issue that have popped up with the change over.
Working on speeding up the map redrawing as player moves around. Found I was reloading the images from file every time I created a new map strip. Loaded that once as a global variable and now it runs much faster. Also have one map strip generated per frame to help with loading speeds. Will have this happen off screen for final version. I’ve also attached this version. Feed back would be appreciated on playdate hardware; on map generation speed and if there are slowdowns while walking around the world map, especially when you cross a boundary and it loads five new segments at once.
No updates for last week, had a hard drive start to fail last week, the one with my playdate code on. Started getting weird errors while compiling so stopped working on it to prevent data loss. I was able to back up the drive, and have a new drive and it should be fine again. I’ve been busy the last few weeks with my physics and maths tutoring job as the students are in exam season. Some feed back on the level generation speed and world map FPS on device would be appreciated.
