It was decided quite some time ago that work was to be halted on the existing prototype of The Cursed Crown and begin on a functional alpha. That work has been progressing, albeit fairly slowly. After all, I’m only one person and trying to create a game with its own world and ethos is tiring work. Plus there’s other responsibilities, like actual work. The pandemic has made things a little easier lately. I’m working from home now so I save almost 90 minutes each day in commuting that I don’t have to do anymore, and there’s little temptation to go out and do much socially with much of the world still closed down. But that doesn’t mean that I can dedicate every spare hour to coding and developing, either.
So what I have done is made slow, but steady progress. I currently have a functional character controller and I’m working on an introductory/tutorial overworld scene. From this overworld, there will be a couple dungeons where key items can be collected and a final dungeon that will house the end of the demo. That’s the plan at least. I still require a few more things to get this finalized.
First, I need to finish the demo’s overworld. That sounds like the easy part, but I’ve learned something in this process: I’m not an artist. Building this terrain and the buildings in it is turning out to be a far more demanding process than expected. It’s going, but it’s not so much a run as it is a sprint through knee-high mud.
Next, I need to figure out how to transition from one scene to the next while storing the game’s state efficiently. You don’t want to lose stats and inventory every time you go into or out of a dungeon, do you? Tied to this is serializing (saving) the game between sessions. The processes are intrinsically linked, but key differences mean I’ll make note of these as separate points.
Then I’ll need a couple menus so you can start a game, load a game, maybe set some options, and quit the game. I don’t know just how much I need for this alpha, but I’ll need a full selection of options to support multiple tiers of computer specs.
And finally, I’ll need some AI. This is the most daunting part as I see it. I took a couple semesters of AI for my undergrad degree, but I still don’t have any idea how to make enemies. I have a couple starting points, so maybe there will be some easy, if not basic, ways of getting started.
Then that’s it. A game is made. Sounds easy, right? I’ll try to be better at updating things here as I make progress. For now, though, keep on gaming.
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