Let’s take a look at pathfinding. Pathfinding is the process where the game can determine a suitable or optimal path from one point to another by traversing the game’s terrain. It’s a critical part of almost all games (RPGs, RTSs, turn-based strategy.. basically anything that has a variable terrain or map is going to need
Lately, I have been rewriting some of the subsystems in Icefall. Now that the core of the gameplay is in place, it is time to go back and implement flexible/efficient versions of systems I originally coded in very fast to get the basic game up and running. Mainly this involves recoding subsystems to do things
Sometimes, you produce a UI that makes perfect sense to you, but when you introduce it to another player, they can’t follow it. That happened to me with Icefall’s UI bar. Originally, my layout placed the player character’s health and mana bars in the bottom left corner, with the player’s current target displayed next to
Hi again. Although I haven’t posted anything for a long time, I have still been (occasionally) developing Icefall. There are three new concepts which I have introduced since my last Icefall post – two enhancements to the visual engine, and one to the game core. Today I’ll talk about one of the visual enhancements –
People who know me on Facebook may be aware that I recently took a break from Icefall to focus on networking code. I plan for networking to form an important part of Icefall’s gameplay: the game itself is not realtime multiplayer, however I plan for an ‘Auction House’, scoreboards/leaderboards/server-firsts, player-to-player mail, and other online community-type
Long time, no update. My holiday from my real job is almost at an end, but the good news is that I have spent a lot of time with Icefall and it’s actually starting to come together! I had developed a lot of separate pieces of game infrastructure (random map generation, character creation, character death…
Sorry, no posts for a while! I’m on holiday for Christmas, although I will be spending some time working on finishing up Icefall, I probably won’t be posting that much. See you in the new year!
OK, this trick is probably universally known, but I’ve only just discovered it (by the classic programmer method of reinventing it), so on the chance there are others who are unfamiliar with this technique, it’s worth describing. Any sufficiently complex game is going to have “assets”: data external to the main program that the game
One of the hardest bits about creating Icefall was getting the User Interface (UI) just right. Icefall’s chief inspirations are “old-school” role-playing games like Angband (aka Roguelikes: Nethack, Moria, Omega, ADOM all fall into this category). But these old-school games all rely on essentially a text-mode interface with a myriad of hotkeys. I want to
Because screenshots are always interesting, here is a screenshot of the “Character Creation” part of Icefall. This is one of the very first screens new players will see, as they opt to begin a new adventure the first thing to do is decide who they’re going to be. (I deliberately replaced the description text with