Keeping up with the monthly video updates, here’s what I have to sum up March 2017:
For the UDK enthusiasts who want to know more about how it works…
The list of available campaigns, along with the campaign name and description, and the level to load in order to start your campaign, are all pulled from an ini. If you want to add a campaign, you just have to add a line to the configuration file.
Constantly learning more about Flash, and I can tell I still have a lot to learn about presenting an attractive UI. It’s coming along though.
Here’s a randomly generated hero who just happens to be old. We now have some more variation in the character portraits with the addition of facial hair, balding, and wrinkles. Most of the heroes will be young, but now the world won’t be populated entirely by shiny anime youth.
I brought down the saturation on the character sprites by about 15. Now the screen is a bit easier to look at. That change was probably the quickest and easiest improvement I made this month. All I had to do was select all of the offending textures, right click, bring up their properties, and reduce the saturation across the whole selections. Also, I got rid of the character shadows. Some SSAO did a pretty good job I think of replacing those shadows.
Cel shading and toon lines (finely tuned now, instead of the solid black smear I had before) help unite the look of the world, making the 3D environment a little more cartoony to match the characters. Still, if you don’t like toon lines, you can turn them off in the options. I finally got around to figuring out how to access the world properties’ postprocessing chain in code, and I apply a MaterialInstanceConstant to tune the Sobel edge material.
Usually your characters will level up on the battlefield, but here we’re using a cheat code to level a character outside combat. The messages used to be displayed on a mesh in the game world. I was never quite content with how that worked, so instead I have various messages (such as damage, level-ups, and some other notifications) drawn in a GFxMovie that renders to a RenderTexture that gets put into an array in the HUD, that the HUD sorts according to distance (so that “closer” textures draw on top), and then finally draws on the screen. I’m going to use the same technique to add combat banter. It’ll be simple now that I know how to do it and now that the system is already in place.
And we finally implemented level-up cards. I seriously made about 100 of these. Seriously. There’s one card for each of your characters’ 18 primary skills, attributes, and elements. Then there are the secondary skills like dodge, block, and critical hit. And now you’ll start the game with just two character classes, and I made 18 cards for each of the other character classes that you can unlock. And then there are leadership skills, crafting skills… maybe that was all. And each card has some lore written in the description. The cards have a texture variable so they each can have unique pictures, but I just haven’t made the cards’ faces yet.
And here’s a preview of crafting in Himeko Sutori. It’s not working yet, but we’re making progress.
We’re getting close to finished. We’re finishing up all of the little details now. I think we can realistically hope to have a simple playable test campaign in a couple more months.
