GID23 and NPC Editor

Last weekend was GID23. Gary Preston and I teamed up again to produce a sequel to the old Teaminator game from GID 3.5, called Teaminator: Brew Isles.

As a base we used a heavily modified TGE 1.5 codebase that Ken Holst and I were working on over Christmas. The intent back then was to make Teaminator 2, but due to time and burnout it never got finished. It did, however, provide a ton of pretty solid tech to build upon.

This .plan is not about last weekend, so to read (a little) more about Brew Isles, and to download the finished game, have a look at our progress thread over on the Game in a Day forums.

Whilst on the whole the codebase was pretty solid, the weakest area by far was NPCs. We had most of what we needed for them, but it had not yet been battle tested. GID23 provided said battle testing, and this weekend has been spent fixing the issues. Gary has been working on improving the dialogue tree code, whilst I've been making an NPC editor. The former is probably more important, but the latter makes for better screenshots ;)

Stupid Beard the Stupid Pirate, from Brew Isles



Editing Stupid Beard the Stupid Pirate



The Blind Lookout, from Brew Isles



The character art is from Frogames' CS:Warriors and Commoners pack. The reason that the NPC editor was not only possible but easily implemented was due in no small part to Christophe's extremely well thought out artwork. Whilst working on Brew Isles, we found it to provide pretty much everything we needed on the art and animation side of NPCs. Actually, "NPC" is a bit of a misnomer as we are using it for the player as well. The "NPC" editor will also be repurposed as a player avatar customizer for the actual game.