As it is with Aeges Road

This is a long post to give a good outline of where Aeges Road currently stands. Things are looking good, but I have been feeling the time crunch for the last two months. I might even get an ulcer if I am not level building come December. :-) Looking back, I can see that my biggest problem was that I had no experience in many of these areas, and developing balanced tactical combat has taken longer than I expected.

This weekend marked the half way point in the game competition in which I have Aeges Road entered. It was interesting to see the feedback on all of the projects, and very humbling to see so many incredible teams and individuals working so hard towards this. If you haven't taken a look at all of these projects, than a visit is necessary, go here.

Recently I posted some oddity item artwork, and after several comments I have gotten, I am just as surprised as I am excited to say that this is the direction I am taking with the equipment artwork. As a note, I liked it, I wanted it, but I was skeptical as to whether I could sell it, literally sell it. :-) Now I feel a bit of optimism shining through the clouds, and I am going with it. My original plan was to have these items as part of the Weird Eddies collection in the Chalt Village. Oh well, maybe Eddie can design some high heal hiking boots or something?

On other artistic notes, unless I change my mind again, I am going with the original tile set look and feel for the game. It has a bit of a mid-90s RTS look to it. I always liked the RTS tiles sets, they usually just lacked good scenery, though a few really stood out. Stat and inventory screens have changed significantly, and so have the combat screen controls. I felt that what I had was a bit to hard to manage for a new user, and simplified things with a dedicated stat and inventory screen. For some reasons I had grand illusions of a console release early on, then realized I need to cater toward my current platform first and foremost.

AI is fully working, with just a few bugs right now. It uses a heuristic approach to terrain, and enemy placement and weighs the risks and rewards of each possible move. I think I have located the worst bugs as being directly located in both the path finding and the range finding algorithms. I have an algorithm on paper that will soon replace the range finding algorithm, and the oddball A* is solid theory, I think I am just missing something which will hopefully show itself during beta testing. Luckily, this hard to locate bug is not a show stopper, it just causes unresponsiveness sometimes, and the occasional silly path. I think the silly path has to do with an error in the terrain preprocessing (sorry, I'm running out of angles, and I have no one else to blame). :-)

After play testing my old rule set against two AI algorithms (the first AI was boring, but solid), I found it be pretty much a gamble rather than progress and tactical. While there needs to exist that gamble that adds to the anxiety and possible consequences of each action, there does need to exist some consistency as well. The ability to tactfully give yourself an advantage, or the ability to realize you are at a disadvantage is important to me. It helps bring skill into the game. So I decided to keep base stats and professions, but I completely changed their purpose with a complete rewrite of the derived stats system and the skill system.

While this is still in development, I have not posted a screen shot in a while, so I can't help myself. As you can see, things have really changed. There is a new five elemental system that is used to determine both physical and elemental combat modifiers. It also changed the way professions and equipment are used in terms of tactics. Professions are a bit more static in their level ups, giving them more obvious strengths and weaknesses. Weapons and armor are now modifiable through gem slots. Here is a screen shot of the inventory system in action. Currently, the gem slots are not in operation, but that will change very soon. The rest of the inventory system is almost fully functional. I just need it working with the characters and updating stats, which will happen when I finish the stats portion of the project.



Of course, character creation is taking on a rewrite, but it will actually be simpler than the old method, making it easier for a player to customize and get into the game. With 100 levels possible per character, this will give the player plenty of customization options throughout the game. One possible problem that may arise later on in the game, is that a part full of jack of all trades will have difficulty overcoming enemies who are specialists. While the idea of the game is to bring a bit of balance to both tactics, the bottom line is that math eventually finds its limits as Enron and World Com found out. :-)

The story line is shaping up, and sequel and prequel notes are being kept in order to offer an intriguing series rather than a loosely knit set of games loosely based on a similar concept. I may eventually do the latter, but trilogies seem to be a popular thing. I still have no building art to speak of. I have a bit of dungeon art and a level mock up. I have quite a bit of out doors art. I have some character art, I have stopped to spruce up the animations a bit before continuing use of my template. The few characters I have are all NPCs, and will be usable for the game since I did not have to update their animation frames.

I currently do not have save game functionality. I do have a file template wrote up, pretty much a simple markup type language used to save variables and arrays to file. Level building is waiting for more artwork, but I have general guides made up to help me structure the outdoor map which will greatly speed things up. The structure is based on the game map, so with some luck, the game map will be usable in game with just a few modifications. I also need to re-write the level transition and spawning code.

Music is still in the air, though I think I can do it myself. I am waiting until later in the project to make sure everything else is done first. I have six songs noted down for possible tracks in case I don't have time to make my own. Sound effects will most likely be purchased. I have very little experience with wave form, and don't have time to get creative with it. Particle effects are still needed, but I have some fun ideas. I programmed some cool particles in Java once for a PLAF I never finished because I was afraid I would give someone epelepsie (like me). I called it Drop, because its biggest feature was that it would make ripples when you were typing or moving the mouse over it. I may dig those up and try and port them over to torque.

The main parts of the website are just waiting for me to fill with content. This weekend I finally got the template finished, and working on IE 6 no less. The forums, games sales, and possible blog integration will be added as I get more acquainted with Ruby on Rails. Nice framework for anyone looking into MVC application development.

So this is where Aeges Road stands. Come test time in March, I may still have some place holder art in the levels. I will also probably wait until then to work out my AI issues, because none of the problems are show stoppers and I can currently play my game without any crashes. Some errors I expect are just bad heuristic calculations that in making these simple fixes, I will get re-acquainted with the code easily.