theWulfen 2 – Blog

Update June 09

Well the last month was particularly crap, a number of things have kept me away from W2 which hopefully after a funeral this afternoon should ease up. I have however begun to rewrite the back end of the framework that I have created, so this is now becoming more efficient.

More online games are appearing in the market, a few very good (Warrior Epic comes to mind) and some total rubbish.  However the marketplace has become more crowded as a result.  Now one thing that seems to be becoming more apparent is player’s requirements.  Players like casual groups/parties, where they can conquer some objective and culmulativly gain a reward/xp.  Players generally dislike repeating the same activity over and over again, even if it has a tangible outcome.  Players like being able to group with friends (be they in or out of the game).  Players like the freedom of being able to solo parts of the game.  15 ~ 20 minutes is an ideal length for a section after which point most people seem to be happy to have a break, those who want to carry on will just head straight into a new section.  Players do want a way of investing money into their game experience.  Buying novelty items is largely pointless, but equally players don’t want to see somebody who is flush spending vast amounts of cash on the game and gaining an unfair advantage.

I’ve had a bit of a rethink about maps and similar as well and am going to tweak W2 into more of a dungeon based game.  Travel will still be dangerous, but not require the player to navigate miles before they reach their destination.  During travel time events may occur.  An inn will be available in every village, town and city where you can recruit other group members or be yourself recruited.  Each group will exist within its own ‘instance’ so there is no chance of other parties stealing kills.  Dungeons will be randomly generated in the same way as the old Warhammer Quest game and will have a mixture of forested, jungle and interior ‘board tiles’.

I need to spend some time considering how characters will level up as well.  Warhammer Quest (WQ) and in fact Warrior Epic (WE) both have a gold = xp type system.  Everytime you kill something in WE you get gold and at the end of a dungeon that gets turned into XP.  In WQ you get gold as a reward for killing things and then spend it on training – plus other provisions.  I’m currently verging more towards a WQ-esq concept.  Monsters will reward gold coins, and you will be able to purchase silver coins.  Gold coins must be used training.  Silver and gold coins can be used to purchase provisions, such as healing potions, rope, bandages etc.  All monster drops will be split equally amongst the party, unless the player is ‘idle’.  I’m toying with the idea of having the skill system linked to a more traditional XP method, but specific to what you do.  So if a character hits something with a slashing weapon, they will gain XP in slashing weapons and can purchase a skill from that pool – providing they have enough skill slots (1 per trained character level).

The biggest benefit from going this route is that there is suddenly a definate path to follow.  Basic city/town > Simple Travel > Dungeon Creation > Combat.  Suddenly W2 looks less horrific!

Never gets any easier

Blimey, life doesn’t get any easier does it!  I’ve had loads of high pressure jobs on at work, a few private sites that seem to be taking an age and loads of people breaking computers.  Chuck in internet explorer 8 and a number of common libraries that I use breaking and being updated and time seems to have vanished.  Up shot is that I have done no direct work on w2 for another 3 months.  At this rate I’m going to be retiring by the time I get it running…

I have however managed to find time to experiment with various map generation methods.  One possibility that I derived was using a canvas element.  This would work innately in FireFox and Google Chrome, but would need a hack for IE.  There is also a memory leak where a page refresh doesn’t clear the memory used by the canvas, so I’ve largely put that to one side as not being viable.  However I have generated a file progressive-downloader routine that would allow me to ‘prepare’ the images into an object and display a nice ‘loading’ progress bar.

Another Long Gap

Surprise surprise another long gap of inactivity   However things have happened over the period, just at a fairly slow pace.  Firstly I have got all of the graphics finished that I commissioned almost a year ago.  The UI graphics are amazing, despite taking a while to get, they capture the atmosphere that I’m looking for.  I’ve cut, spliced and hacked the original source file around and managed to produce something that I feel works from a technical point of view, I still have a significant amount of work to do in order to get the file size down however as the basic UI is running around 782Kb.  There are two key files that are causing this, but I’m going to tackle them at a later date.

Continue reading Another Long Gap…

3 Months

Well that’s summer gone now – not that we had much of one in the UK anyway.  Just a small progress post to say that things are finally on their way again.  I’ve had an email with the UI graphics completed on, I need to download and ensure that I’m happy with them tonight.

I have also begun coding a chat element for the site.  I think that one key element that the original Wulfen game lacked was any kind of in-game player interaction, so W2 will have a chat panel off to one side of the game area.  I aim to have various channels within this (the usual world/town/trade chat’s), which hopefully should add quite a bit more depth to the game.

Dead Slow or Stop?

Another month has vanished, and still no coding with W2…  I now have all 4 race concepts and that mini-project is done and dusted.  The Game UI however hasn’t progressed at all, so I’m now chasing that.  All credit to the artist who did the race concepts, she was constantly on the ball, and although it wasn’t a ’speedy’ process by any stretch (most artists tend to juggle multiple clients at once) it was a very thourough one and I think that there was only one delay, that was because an email didn’t come through.

Fingers crossed the UI gets done shortly as I’m itching to start coding something!

Progressing

Just a quick update post to say that things are progressing along OK.  I now have 2 fully completed race graphics and one more that I’ve asked for a few minor changes on.  Although I had to contact the artist, the UI artwork has now been started and looks awesome – a lot better than I could have done without a doubt.

I’ve been working on another project recently, so have deliberatly put W2 on the back burner until thats finished.  I expect that I’ll have all of the artwork done by the end of June and should have pretty much tied the other project up by then.

Its looking good!

Bits

The artwork for Wulfen is now complete.  Looks ace.

Ursa are now just waiting colouring – again looks ace.  They’ve come out like rather dangerous teddies – with claws and armour of course

If I’ve not heard anything by the end of the week on the UI graphics, then I’ll check with the artist who’s doing that.

All quiet

I’ve not posted anything to the blog for a week now.  As mentioned earlier, I’ve now secured artists for the website UI and for the main character portrait for the 4 playable races.  50% payment has now been made and that ball is now rolling.  I also have briefly spoken to an artist who does the most phenominal landscapes and he’s happy to discuss doing location graphics once I know what I need and have pulled in a bit more cash.

Once I have the website graphics I can actually crack into starting the site and putting together ideas/elements – its getting quite exciting!

Progress

So then, I’ve made a little progress, though not directly as I’ve been snowed under with work.  Its now the weekend - infact a 4 day weekend due to Easter - woohoo!

I have now commissioned the 4 character pieces and a set of elements for the UI of the site.  They’ve cost me more than I was originally going to spend, but its going to be a worthwhile investment overall as these pieces will make or break the game.  Although its very shallow, the majority of people will rate any game on its looks first and gameplay second, so by putting their creation in the hands of somebody who is a professional makes the most logical sense.

I should have all of the characters by the end of April, and hopefully the same sort of timescale for the UI bits (or sooner).  What that means is that by the middle of the year, I’ll have at least something working – though far from finished.

Artist

After over 30 applicants, I believe that I’ve narrowed the character concept artwork down to a single artist.  Additionally I think I have sourced somebody to create all of the building block elements for the UI of the site.

Its all coming together!  I should then be able to get coding – woohoo!