{"id":310,"date":"2013-03-11T09:29:35","date_gmt":"2013-03-11T09:29:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/?p=310"},"modified":"2013-03-11T09:29:35","modified_gmt":"2013-03-11T09:29:35","slug":"battlerl-day-1-progress-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/?p=310","title":{"rendered":"BattleRL : Day 1 progress report"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, how did day 1 of coding for the challenge go?<\/p>\n

For most parts, it went well. I managed to get most of the map generation out of the way, and while I am not completely happy with it as of right now, I think that it is a good start that should enable me to get some idea of how the gameplay works once I have it in there.<\/p>\n

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Water, trees and building with no entrance.<\/p><\/div>\n

I decided to go with a map of 500 by 500 tiles, wich makes for quite a big map, but one that you should still be able to explore if not completely, at least well enough. I will have to determine the relationship between the size of the map and time – after all, you only have three days to emerge victorious – but that will happen when I can actually playtest the game. It may be that the map is too big for creating interesting gameplay too, so everything at this point is up for change.<\/p>\n

From the technical part, I based myself on this article<\/a>\u00a0but simplified : The perlin noise I generated was not fractal, so the level of detail was way lower. That is one of the things I want to revisit in the world generation, given I have enough time. Right now, the islands are really<\/em>\u00a0blocky, their shape is as uninteresting as can be. While I do not want to take height into account, having a ‘strange’ shape should make for more interesting subsequent games.<\/p>\n

I am also not sure on the look I want the game to have. I really want to differentiate between nighttime and daytime, but how exactly… I do not want to spend too much time on graphics though, I would much rather devote more time to the actual map generation or to the polishing of the gameplay. Yesterday I tried both using only characters (as above), or background colors (as below).<\/p>\n

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The map with background colors for the tiles.<\/p><\/div>\n

The main ‘issue’ with the current map generation is that it takes a whole lot of time to create the island. I would like to adress that.<\/p>\n

But apart from working on the map generation, I think I managed to do a good amount of things ‘in the backend’ : the map scrolls inside a limited viewport leaving space for the message log and the rest of the UI, for instance. How these will pay off remains to be seen, but as of now I feel I have a good grip on things.<\/p>\n

My next step is to throw the player into the world. That means field of view, checking for passable\/unpassable terrain, and maybe adding the various bars in the right sidebar.<\/p>\n

If possible, I would also want to take an hour to use a file-based description of terrain tiles and objects in preparation for day 3, which should be devoted to combat mechanics. Stay tuned!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, how did day 1 of coding for the challenge go? For most parts, it went well. I managed to get most of the map generation out of the way, and while I am not completely happy with it as of right now, I think that it is a good start that should enable me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[41,42,8,4,3],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=310"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":314,"href":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions\/314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}