A long time with no blog updates, but things have still been happening on Free Company.

Since the last time I’ve implemented a new combat – framework? I guess is the right word, that evaluates combat attack success based on how much ‘energy’ the defender has left, as well as things like attributes, skills and equipment. At the same time unsuccessful attacks have been changed so that they do damage to this new ‘energy’ concept proportional to how powerful the attack was. The idea behind this self reinforcing system is both to speed up combats by quickly driving home an advantage to the likely eventual winner and also to make all attacks actually change something within the game. At the same time the concept of health has become a lot more granular and a lot more scarce, most horde type enemies will only have a single ‘wound’ now and mercenaries will have to train to get extra wounds if they want to survive prolonged combats (I’ve yet to decide how many to start them with but I’m leaning towards two).

This has been quite a big mechanical change so it’s detail will no doubt continue to be refined and its unintended consequences explored as the development goes on but for now I’m happy that it is better than what was there before with long grind fest combats, chipping away at health bars and having completely wasted rounds due to a couple of crappy dice rolls.

I’ve also been spending some time improving most of the UI widgets based on some feedback from my tiny play test team (thanks bro). This has involved exposing more previously hidden information, adding more tool tips and fixing problems with open UI panels not being updated when the world state changes around them. Half of the battle with designing a game is explaining to the players what is going on in a clear enough way that they can make good decisions. I’m sure this battle with explaining the design through the UI will continue until I stop working on the project.

As well as improving the information content of the UI I’ve also embarked on a mini art splurge to try and improve the looks of a few bits of it by drawing some generic mercenary ‘portraits’ for use on the character sheets, in merc lists and possibly in a future group selection UI.

Other than that, I’ve been dual-classing again this month; doubling up as an exam invigilator when I’m not working at home on the game. Hopefully these vital pennies will help continue to fund my itinerant lifestyle of reckless game development and finally get this game finished.

Christmas happened too. I miss it already. Sort of.

This week I’ve been working my way through some of the smaller tasks on the looming To Do list. First up was an attempt to make a more impressive ‘boss’ variant monster for my barbarian encounter. I thought I’d give him an impressive beard (seen above) and one of those horned hats plus the usual array of slightly boosted stats. Unfortunately the beard really isn’t all that visible from the isometric perspective so he looks like a regular barbarian warrior in a hat but that can’t be helped. I might make him some fur-esque armour to wear, give him an ornate axe or just make another head with a really huge beard. The point is the principle is now there; he slotted into the encounter with no trouble and with a bit of code cleanup it was easy to give him special hats, heads and whatever else so I moved on. Next up was dual wielding, I wanted to give players the option to stick a one handed weapon in each hand because it’s totally cool in a sort of 14 year old boy way who I can just about remember being. As you can see from the above picture that now basically works, I haven’t decided how exactly the attack is going to work for dual wielders yet but you can at least carry two weapons about and swap them in and out of your inventory with no bother. Lovely. Oh I also made the dagger item to show it off properly.

Then I decided to make some of the extra mercenary body models I’ve had planned for a while. One in regular clothes with no armour for those times when you decide not to wear any for whatever reason (seen above) and another in a magical/priest-esque robe for when you want to ‘rock it’ like a magic user. That one looks a bit like this:

I made a gnarled wizard staff for him as well, as you can see, and that’s the old ‘wizard hat’ on his head there which I did a little while ago. They’ll all look smaller and further away in the game of course but for now you can enjoy them up close and personal. Finally, today I went through all the old mercenary animations and gave them a bit of tweaking to try an make them a bit less floaty, I expect I’ll revisit them a few more times before I finish adding variants and improving the believability as much as I can.

Wednesday this week was spent out on strike (can an indie developer go on strike?) with my partner (who as a teacher definitely can). We marched around London for a few hours with hundreds of others, waved a union flag and held up a union placard. The reason of course is to protest against the large effective cuts in compensation for all public sector workers (as well as the firing of a huge number of others). My brother and my father have both been made redundant by the current government and now my partner faces a hefty effective direct pay cut (no pay rises in line with soaring inflation), a new 3% tax to help pay down the deficit, a direct cut in her pension at retirement and an effective cut by changing the inflation linking of the pension from RPI (actual inflation) to ‘CPI’ (government inflation fiddle to keep it lower). All that on top of the retirement age being boosted (which isn’t that unreasonable a measure given that we are living longer but I’m not sure I’d want to be rescued by a 67/68 year old fireman, would you?). The government thinks these cuts are only ‘fair’ because a large number of the lower paid people in the private sector have lost their pensions too in the last few years. Apparently it’s a race to the bottom, cut something from the private sector then turn around and use that cut to justify cutting it in the public sector a few years later. They also like to use disingenuous comparisons between the compensation in the public and private sectors overall, despite the range of occupations in the two sectors being so different now since all the lower paid jobs in the public sector have been privatised and outsourced. Yes teachers (currently) get paid more money than shop assistants but they have to get a lot more education to do so. Traditionally the decent pensions in the public sector have been seen as compensation for the lower wages compared to similarly skilled jobs in the private sector.

Anyway, I’m sure that governments pay strikers no heed nowadays, fears of ‘revolution’ have long since receded and generally the non striking public seems to turn against them if they go on for more than five minutes. However, even if it is just raging against the dying light, it still feels good to take back some measure of control for just a day. I expect that strikes might become more of a feature of daily life if this ‘decade of austerity’ comes to pass as predicted.

On the bright side, video games! Still awesome.

I think I’m over the worst of it now. Well near the very crest at least.

So, in the scant moments when I haven’t been inexorably sucked into the mountainous peaks of Tamriel, what have I been doing? Free Company wise I have mostly been setting up the UI flow, game logic and necessary data to allow your mercenaries to grow in experience and learn new skills. Which they can now just about do. The available skill pool is still sitting at a paltry four right now but I’m expanding it in my other code-a-tron window as I type this. So in not too long you’ll have a wide range of ways be able to specialise your mercenaries in meaningful ways and thus gain new and interesting methods of dispatching your opponents.

Other than that I have an upcoming feature list that I’m still pondering over. I plan to get it all in eventually but what should I add now and what should be moved to later on? Here’s a few of them:

• Campaign mode – building structures in your base camp to unlock nebulous other ‘things’
• Campaign mode – UI clean up + additional UI screens to fiddle with.
• Dual wielding – look a sword in each hand!
• More weapons – daggers, working spears, staves, bows
• Sneaking focus – stealth related skill or skills, special animations and more stealthy looking outfits.
• Buffed up encounters – featuring bosses that wear special hats and better initial positioning.
• Undead focus – zombie shuffling animations, undead skills, rising from the dead ambushes, crypt tileset.
• Demonic focus – demonic skills, occult decorations
• Spidery focus – webs, spiders shooting webs, spider ceiling ambushes, more scary spiders.
• Sewer focus – sewer tileset, more rat stuff.
• Magic – particle system, magic effects, spells, mage clothing, magic staffs.
• AI focus – improve AI beyond basic attack routines, navigating doors correctly, variety between monster types.
• Current tileset layout focus – improve the way levels get laid out, place small objects on shelves, lay out rooms with more symmetry and less randomness
• Tileset furniture focus – create objects that hang on walls,   more rugs, more ornaments, more debris objects
• Combat rules focus – add more basic combat rules concerning positioning and the interface to support them (back stabs, flanking attacks, disengaging from hostiles penalties, zones of control). Consider unified, regenerating ‘energy bar’ governing attacking and attack parrying to try and avoid the problem of boring ‘whiff’ attacks as well as feeling of hacking away at a large health bar chunk by chunk.
• Speeding up getting into combat focus – realtime movement when not in combat, group movement & group selection when not in combat.
• Existing animation focus – improve the already existing animations and add alternates to create more variety.

And so on

Free Company has also had a bit of a musical boost recently with the help of indie game music supremo Stian Stark   (Whose work can also be heard in fantastic games like Solium Infernum). Stian has kindly agreed to supply an original piece of music in return for a bottle of indie game developer dreams and unicorns*. In fact, he already has supplied it and it’s a fantastic piece, doom laden and hopeful all at the same time which is perfect for the grime and black humour of a mercenary company. You should all go visit his website or buy one of the many other games he has contributed to so he gets some money immediately.

Outside of the soft embrace of games; the Robotic Shed recently had to take its newest inhabitant; a soft, happy kitten, off to the vets for a rather sensitive operation. The experience was quite traumatic, but I’m now fairly well recovered. The kitten took it all in his stride, at least once he was safely back at home and now has moved on completely to his latest nemesis; the grey cat from somewhere up the street. The Shed currently isn’t sure whether the kitten wants to play with, smell, fight or flee from the grey cat but will be sure to keep you all updated.

*May not contain unicorns

This week I have been mostly adding; various hats.

I had a lovely holiday wandering (and wondering) about the Cotswolds entirely disconnected from computers and the internet. Those times are past now though so its back into the rat race of game development which as everybody now knows is 50-75% based on the creation of hats. You can see a couple of the new hats above, they don’t do that much in the game really, maybe add a little bit of protection here and there, but mainly they are just to add a bit of individual style to your little squad of mercenaries. I’ve made six different hats so far adding a tricorn, wizard hat and another hornless half helm to the three you can see above. I’d like to make it to a nice round number of hats and helms (like say 10) so if you have any hat suggestions that I’ve not already covered then feel free to slide those slices of brain genius into the letterbox of this posts comment box below.

I fiddled about with the UI a little bit too, but its been pretty much hats all through the week. Hat code, hat inventory icons, hat models, hat textures, wearing hats, looking at pictures of hats and striking the soft gently yielding fabric of hats. Hats, hats, hats, HAAAAAAAAAAATS.

Hats.

One of the consumer selling points of randomly generated content is the infinite variety of potential situations it promises and that’s something I’m hoping to start to capture for the first alpha release of Free Company. Since last time I’ve been working on getting the existing content to be more data and randomly driven. The contract/mission generator now picks between available location layouts, picks a themed set of monster encounters to place there, then passes that information over to the renderer to load the correct tilesets and monsters needed for that mission. All of this is now almost completely data driven so I can dictate new tileset layouts and monster encounter setups with a couple of xml files and then they can just feed straight into the generator. Lovely.

It’s not all the way there yet though, while there is variety in the actors and the scenery so far the script for these martial plays is always following the same outline; namely ‘kill everyone’. I hope to gradually introduce the potential for new objectives by expanding what the mercenaries can do in the world and then have the generator setup more interesting situations than just indiscriminate murder.

At a lower level  of the game I’ve also been introducing variety by the barebones of a generic skill system to the game with a few starter skills to test it out. I’m hoping that I can eventually give each of the monster types a couple of interesting and unique skills (and the wits to use them correctly). I started with the rats pictured above; giving them the ability to greatly improve their ‘to hit’ percentages by attacking en masse (this is actually a generic rule across the game now but the rats skill makes them extra good at exploiting it). I haven’t given them any special AI routines, but combined with using the new encounter system to increase the average number of rats spawning in a room they now present a formidable challenge if you let them surround you.

Those were the main tasks but I’ve also added a bunch more items into the game that I built, mainly for the new monsters, so that the mercenaries can use them as well and hopefully fixed a few niggling bugs that were interrupting the flow of the game.

Off on holiday next week so it’ll probably be two weeks until I blog again. Try to keep going without me.

I’m also including some random screenshots of the new monsters (and that desk) but now; in the game.

Here you are:

I’m calling this guy a Chained One. I imagine that some kind of demonic ritual gone horribly wrong results in this twisted hate fiend.

This guy is a Pusculus and he’s not very happy about it. You wouldn’t be happy either if you spent your days toiling in the infinite filth pits of Bagolometh.

This flying chappy is an Iphet. Expect mischief in inverse proportion to his diminished stature.

These chaps need a bit more animation attention and then they are pretty much ready to drop into the game. That’s all for today.

So this week we have the bloated giant rat:

He will gorge on your entrails and gnaw on your bones.

Then we have a giant spider too. A lot of people don’t like spiders so I’m plotting to include a ‘Cobbet mode’ in the game options that will exclude them from the generator.

This guy looks quite friendly though. Probably should work on that.

And finally we have the cowled and insubstantial Shadow wielding a giant two handed sword with preternatural ease.

Another undead beast to grapple with alongside the skeletons and zombies from last week.

I’ve also started poking around in the rusty old bad guy data code to better support the variety of behaviours and characteristics of these varied villains. Shortly skeletons will no longer bleed with ruby red blood.

That’s all for now.

First up the promised video of a door opening. Sadly, it is a bit of a failure as an exciting door related promo as the video shows the doors in their least beautiful light, opening right through a mercenary. Ah well,  here it is anyway:

Next up is a new monster model, the fearsome skeleton model with spear and boshed together shield:

Scary.

And what would a skelton be without his life long pal the zombie? Nothing much probably. So here he is too:

Clutching an improvised club.

There has also been some other, much less exciting to probe with ones eyes, progress on boosting AI performance, removing normal map bugs and clearing up a variety of fun bugs caused by the introduction of doors. The general plan short term plan right now is to boost the visual variety of enemies and then to work on making them all feel different tactically with different AI, skills and weapon setups. Hopefully, I should be back in the swing of the weekly-ish updates now so check back next time for some more monsters!

Look at that lovely pair of convex hulls!

Work on Free Company continues through the Summer Holidays down here in the shed. I’ve been learning about exciting topics like convex decomposition as I bring the game’s physics implementation up to scratch. It’s been tough going, mostly as I haven’t had any real experience fiddling about with physics in this kind of depth before. It seems that the moment you want to go beyond knocking over piles of boxes things get a little more complicated. Bah.

I’ve managed to wrap pretty much every object in the game in some kind of physics representation now, using a mix of hand crafted and auto-generated convex hulls. This means for a start that the ragdoll dead bodies now no longer clip embarrassingly through walls, it also means that I can click directly on the arch shaped doors in the game to interact with them. I wanted to have a some kind of video of me finally cracking open doors with wild abandon as the mercenaries wander freely about the levels. Unfortunately, I’ve run out of time this week to get the easier non-physicsy parts of it working properly yet so it’d probably just look a bit daft to the casual observer. Expect it next time instead.

It’s also been ludicrously hot here in London, so I’m amazed my brain even managed to do anything other than melt. Good work brain.

Upcoming (if it cools down a bit):

• Finally working useable doors!
• Super clever cover calculations using raytests!
• Stripping out old crappy physics code!
• Finally not having to think about physics for a while!