Stephen E. Dinehart's IMD Blog

My thesis is well underway, I spend long days and nights working at home in my empty living room, now studio, creating art assets, designing sound, composing music, programming and planning. and at this point I feel like I’m just wrapping up the loose ends. I have to remind myself that having scripting things like spell functions are fun! Sure a heal spell is a mere 30 lines of code, but hey, for me that’s huge. The whole game is about 700 lines.

The core game system is finished except the following, which I should have wrapped within two weeks.

1. Base Build
a. Spell system
i. Script 1 other spell function
ii. create game state variable (encounter, combat, movie)
b. Level up
i. Affect Spells
ii. fills up MP and HP to 100%
iii. create new design
c. Death
i. create new design
d. Map/Monster Spawn dependency
' c. Item System
d. Triggers

I’m extremely excited with the level of narrative quality I have been able to accomplish; it has this kind of He-man cartoon quality in an animated comic form. I tested doing some VO for the characters but after doing some viewing of my tests I have decided it takes away too much, makes my characters too human.

An issue I’ve always had, that fantasy and sci-fi worlds are so based in our reality. It is a dilemma, I’ve tooled over many times. My conclusion is that you can have a alien world be foreign, but truly alien worlds would be incomprehensible, their characters would communicate in ways very unfamiliar.

There is a balance to be had between the familiar and the new, a remix of old perceptions with new stimuli to create a wholly new experience.

Here is a dilemma I’ve been having, how much information should I show the player. That is, how much HUD is enough? The first image on the left(above) in my older convention of showing the numbers, the right is a newer version where I have converted to the convention of meters to reflect values. Not sure which I like yet, how bout you?