Spent a couple of evenings over the last few weeks working on some basic game play prototyping: YouTube Vid

It looks good. I noticed that at one point the player character was emitting dynamic light. Are you going to make that a permanent thing, or just when the player is experiencing a certain power up or using a certain weapon?

I added the floating dynamic light for a number of reasons TBH.

Part of this RPG Sci-Fi concept is that the suits worn by players provide essentially everything the player needs to exist in hostile alien environments. Each character has 50-60 stats including energy, so I really liked the idea of putting players in incredibly dark levels and need to manage their energy to keep the light on...

On a more practical note I am also thinking about how to use dynamic lights to increase the visual quality with special effects, melee attacks, telepathy and so on. I've already implemented simple dynamic lights for the telepathic attack you can see in this short video, so far I am happy with the basic results.

My priority is to get a working demo for proof of concept up and running so that I can demonstrate confidence in this technology for delivering the product, so any feedback is much appreciated

-Concentrate on a working pathfinding for the opponents.
(not just turn and walk)
Else its hard to add this later into the game.

The opponents must also have a variance in action-states.
like enemies, who attack and run back some distance,
others forming a group and doing a rush-attack.

opponents running for cover when low on health.

----

try to make a random-dungeon generator.
So that you have a collection of premade rooms with
standard connections.
The rooms are added up into a random maze later

I think you did an amazing work there budy
cant really critisize anything

regards

Aztec

I just lost my net connection for the last couple of hours so I've been doing some tidy up work, getting the state manager to work more effectivly and generally cleaning up my sloppy code

Thanks for the positive feedback from both of you.

@OXY:


The Ai have two target skills [pointers], a primary and then secondary target which I plan on using for managing paths/nodes while keeping the primary target as the enemy.. To cut a long story short, the Ai should be pretty well setup for path finding, although I am not sure what solution I will use or write something from scratch...



The enemies and to some extent the players are running through a 'state' manager that I've written. Basically every character has around 40-50 statistics that includes classes and ai behavioural states, so I am pretty confident that I can continue to scope this up as I go.

The icons over the head show the state the Ai is in, pretty basic at the moment, but it should provide a pretty stable base to expand on. Certainly I will want to add 'Run for Cover' and other such behaviour to really breath life into the Ai.

Thanks for the comments both.

So what I am really looking for is comments, suggestions and feedback to really help me decide on the core game mechanics that this title will be built on. I have a high level concept of this game along with the main genre (Sci-Fi RPG) with a potential to expand it to a Diablo level.

The game is currently set up for play using the Xbox 360 controller as well as having support for the keyboard and mouse. The game play really dictates how this will work, for example, if the game should be completely supported by the pad alone, features that require mouse clicks are somewhat redundant.

That said, there is a lot of scope for games, especially RPG'a where a mouse is an absolute requirement.

So I really want to invite discussions about 'How this game would play', this will help me lock down ..ehhem...how it will play!

Of course I would love to hear other ideas for the game, UI, styling...its really a bit of a blank canvas at the moment.

Thanks again all, look forward to reading your replies.

From just watching the video, it looks very boring. the enemies are running to the player, the player hits them a few times, they die and the same again. The fighting doesn´t look very motivating, but very monotonous, simple and boring. But think that this is meant to be changed by adding more states and different times of enemies and maybe some different kind of attacks the player can do. But that is just what I thought while watching the video. I once created a simple dungeon game, there I placed only few light in the level, but wanted the player still to see everything around it thus I didn´t make the player the lightsource but had an elve, shining very bright following the player and flying around him, as some kind of a pet or what ever. Was just a random remember of what I once did... .

Thanks Slin ( Long time no speak ),

I agree the gameplay with enemies swarming the player is not exactly exciting or challenging, thankfully this is more proof of how the underlying game is setup, as I can tweak the enemies strength, health, damage and make it a bit more interesting in that respect... however thats a way off yet

As for animations, you probably also noticed that at stages during the punch cycle the players avatar isnt walking. I've just started re-working the animation system to be based solely in bones, so I can blend walk with other anims...

Once this process is complete I will definatly create more animations which will make it more exciting...

The suit light is invisible in the video, but like you suggest its actually a small ball thats following the player, I like the idea of making it more visible and less locked to the players x,y...

Thanks for the comments, drop me a PM sometime

Looks good so far, a bit like Diablo in a SciFi environment. Of course, its still a prototype, but I like the feeling of enormous enemy masses...^^
If you manage animation interpolation with the blended animations, give a quick hint how you did it - I would be interested in that.

At the first attempt, which is shown in the video, I am using vertex/mesh animations, as I could not get bones to export correctly from 3DsMax. However I've now managed to resolve that pipeline issue and will be rebuilding and exporting all characters with the included bones.

I am going to re-do the animations to make them more suitable to this approach, for example creating a set of upper/lower body animations so I can blend walk and attack, or run and jump etc...

I think this work will take me a few days to re-animate the character and then another few days to re-write the animation system to use bones. I've just been offered some help with the animation system so hopefully we might end up with something very modular.

I am really aiming for a modern Diablo Adventure RPG style game thats set in a SciFi world as I think there is more of a niche market there.

This past week since posting the video I've focused on cleanup and now have a much more stable playable. Lots of improvements to the state manager and a considerable number of silly bugs.

I have to get this finished before next month has been and gone so I am going to crack on. Thanks for your feedback and comments, hope to have a new video ready soon.