{"id":420,"date":"2010-10-30T23:20:16","date_gmt":"2010-10-31T06:20:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shadowdawngenesis.com\/devblog\/?p=420"},"modified":"2010-10-31T11:50:07","modified_gmt":"2010-10-31T18:50:07","slug":"shinies-and-teleports","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shadowdawngenesis.com\/devblog\/?p=420","title":{"rendered":"Shinies and teleports"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Arashi<\/a>
Arashi talks to Placeholder Ket one last time<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This week was fairly unproductive, so I am making up for it over the weekend – it’s only early Saturday night and I’ve already implemented three of my longest-standing programming tasks along with several other minor but tedious additions.\u00a0 One of my top priorities on my to-do list (other than content generation) is to make the game as user-friendly as possible.\u00a0 Shadowdawn Genesis<\/em> is quite a complex little game\u00a0and pulling it all together into a cohesive product that flows naturally has been a surprisingly long process.<\/p>\n

I finally added a proper animated selection cursor, so now\u00a0there’s next to no way the player will be confused where they are looking in the menu.\u00a0 Before it was just a flashing area of the menu that may or may not have been too subtle.\u00a0 Also, as I had discussed in an earlier blog, I finally got around to splitting off the X Button “Ask” command to the dialog system.\u00a0 Now when Arashi talks to an NPC, they’ll say their hellos and immediate thoughts based on active quests (or whatever flags matter to that NPC), and if the player wants to just move on, they can press the A Button to continue on without another word just like a typical\u00a0RPG.\u00a0\u00a0However, if they want to ask questions\u00a0or get some insight into the character and build relationships, they can press the X Button to bring up the dialog box shown here in the screenshot.\u00a0 This game is going to be pretty involved for dialog, with only the first\u00a0three maps of the forest, Ket already has\u00a025 different “boxes” of text (not counting Arashi’s responses or questions), so one of the things I wanted to do was make it a faster experience.\u00a0 It’s a bit different than games like Dragon Age<\/em> where everytime the player speaks to an NPC, the PC will ALWAYS have to choose a dialog box at the end of their monologue.\u00a0 I just wanted to try something a bit more\u00a0realistic and interactive and not so imposed on the player.\u00a0 We’ll see if it works!\u00a0 There are still plenty of instances where the player will be asked to make a choice, so it will be a good mix of both methods to keep things fresh.<\/p>\n

And at last,\u00a0the Checkpoint Teleport system is finally complete.\u00a0 Now, I should state that teleporting in-game is contrary to the story, so it’s not really<\/em> “teleporting”, but more of an auto-travel mode, that lets the player return to a “claimed” area with a checkpoint flag because they have already proved they can reach it safely.\u00a0 There will be some\u00a0instances where areas have been retaken by stronger enemies and “teleporting” won’t be allowed until the checkpoint is regained, but for the most part it is a convenience to revisit areas to explore new, previously-blocked\u00a0paths as new abilities get unlocked.<\/p>\n

Alright, it’s time for me to sign off again for now, I’m going to get as much of this coding as I can done tonight, and Sunday will be dedicated entirely to Ket’s animation frames (thus the reason for\u00a0the caption underneath the screenshot).\u00a0 What amazes me is how much easiser Ket is to animate than Arashi…. (who still needs me to finish\u00a0her most\u00a0complex skill and combo animations… soon!)<\/p>\n

\"Arashi<\/a>
Arashi reading my mind<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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This week was fairly unproductive, so I am making up for it over the weekend – it’s only early Saturday night and I’ve already implemented […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[39,21,78,22,11,25,10,108,8,38,7,6,18,80,110,13,71,70,72,17,309,107,4,84,119,36,15,33,90,67],"class_list":["post-420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-game-development","tag-2d-animation","tag-action","tag-action-rpg","tag-adventure","tag-anime","tag-arashi","tag-art","tag-checkpoints","tag-concept-art","tag-controls","tag-development","tag-game","tag-independent","tag-indie-game","tag-indie-rpg","tag-jrpg","tag-ket","tag-lighting","tag-menus","tag-pc","tag-rpg","tag-save-anywhere","tag-shadowdawn","tag-shadowdawn-genesis","tag-teleport","tag-usecode","tag-xbox-360","tag-xbox-live","tag-xbox-live-indie-games","tag-xna"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shadowdawngenesis.com\/devblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shadowdawngenesis.com\/devblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shadowdawngenesis.com\/devblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shadowdawngenesis.com\/devblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shadowdawngenesis.com\/devblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shadowdawngenesis.com\/devblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shadowdawngenesis.com\/devblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shadowdawngenesis.com\/devblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shadowdawngenesis.com\/devblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}