Gaming Your Way: Knight's Quest, the story so far...
Sorry we've been a bit quiet here recently,
both Olli and I have been beavering away like a couple of mentals on projects which
hasn't given us any free time to devote to the blog ( Also we didn't have that much
of interest to say ).
Knight's Quest, our first Facebook and our first RPG, has been my main focus for weeks.
It's finally starting to come together after weeks of just working on the techy side,
so I thought it may be of some interest to go over some bits and bobs from it.
The game is iso, which is a pain at the best of times. Z-sorting is murder. How I've
gone about it is to split the map into sectors. Each sector is 16x16 tiles, and we
only z-sort on those visible areas ( Also we turn off any plotting in sectors which
aren't visible ).
This really reduces the sorting to just what is needed, also the floor tiles are burned
into their own bitmap ( See this
old
post ) so we're only having to sort tiles and sprites, which helps.
Also as we're using the
blitter we
don't have to worry about sequential indexes, it's like as2 all over again, where
you could give a sprite any old depth and not care about it.
Next up, the dungeons. I've used Olli's generator ( He's written tons about it
previously )
and it works a treat. Basically it creates "cells" which are in this case 4x4 tiles.
The cells tell us which walls or doors are present. Rather than just randomly plot
tiles I've set up a lot of mc blocks, eg.
This may be tricky to explain well so stick with me. As we read
each cell we know what's there, let's say for example a north and east wall. From
there we look up the array which contains all the blocks with a north and east wall
and pick one at random.
The floor is burnt into the background bitmap and the wall tiles ( Or cauldron placeholders
) are converted into blitter sprites ( Bobs ) which can then be plotted / sorted etc.
The reason for this is that we can then hand design a lot of different wall blocks
and use them randomly ( Rather than just picking one random tile at a time ). It should
make the dungeons look more hand designed, which is what we want.
It's important that we create the impression that someone has slaved over each dungeon
to make it look as non-random as possible.
I think that's about it for now, there will be more to share real soon.
Squize.
