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cjet79  1yr ago (text post)   3570 thread views

Maker's Monday

Trying out a new weekly thread idea.

This would be a thread for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers. We can coordinate weekly standup type meetings if their is interest.

@ArjinFerman, @Turniper, and myself all had some initial interest.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

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Doubling up on Monday threads…What about Tinkering Tuesday? Standup Saturday?

You know, I’ve been meaning to make progress on this for years, but maybe this is the time. Maybe I’ll do a better job sticking with it than I did for HighSpace. I’m going to make a spellcasting sandbox. In rough order,

  • Move a character around a top-down map with terrain
  • Cast spells which create effects on the map
  • Affect the terrain
  • Choose modifications for spells with a real-time interface
  • Construct the spells from a low level with that same interface
  • Fight monsters or other players or something

This week’s goal will be completing the Godot tutorial I’ve had open for ages. If I can manage that, I’ll see about a more elaborate plan.

I wonder if it would be more straightforward to implement completely scriptable spells. If that’s sorted out then you can always scope down what’s possible and slap UI to generate certain types of scripts.

I’ve waffled on that.

There are games like MagicMaker and Noita which give robust tools for programming your spells in game. At one point, I was playing a lot of Mindustry, which lets you set up schematics outside of combat. Then in a computer or player match you have a lot less micromanagement. But the tradeoff is that it feels more like piloting your build than designing it as you go, I guess? Which is a great fantasy, and one which suits a certain archetype of wizard: the consummate planner who has optimized for anything.

So I fell back towards real-time. Something like Magicka gives you a bunch of LEGO bricks and says, here, blow stuff up. Then the rest of the game is built around giving you reasons to try different ones. The PvP spinoff, Wizard Wars, slimmed down your options but made their interactions better. It really sells this mind game where you try and think several options ahead.

For sure. My point is that whichever way you the implementation might be easier if you make it very general first. You could totally make a thing where the user drags and drops Lego blocks to build a specific subset of spells, but under the hood it’s this general purpose scripting engine.

It’s very easy to develop it using only certain actions, then want to add a new action and it takes a significant amount of refactoring.

Imho it’s easier to make the user experience less flexible than more flexible. Just my two cents though! It sounds like a cool project.

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