Viridian Games

I just played the Quake 4 single player demo.

If this were an SAT test, you could sum up Quake 4 as

Quake 4 : Quake 2 :: Doom 3 : Doom 2

Basically, Quake 4 is Quake 2 prettified and given a new situation. You’ll even fight some of the same enemies from Quake 2 early on in 4.

This makes me sad, because the original Quake remains my favorite in the Quake series. I enjoyed the fact that the game jumped back and forth between military installations and gothic castles – it felt like you were jumping between two realities, ours and another that was attempting to take over. I am aware that this was because the Id guys never really finalized a design for the game, but I still liked it. I’d like to see a more direct sequel to the original Quake, perhaps with a feature where levels morph from realistic to fantastic and back while the player is running through them.

Unfortunately, this is an update that doesn’t involve prettier screenshots. I’ve finalized my combat and character advancement systems and begun creating the data files for all the NPCs (monsters and townspeople) in the game.

One thing that is bothering me is that I don’t feel I’m giving the player very many choices when it comes to combat. While I understand that I’m a programmer, and therefore this is ultimately a programming exercise, I also do dabble in design and the design that is coming out is simple, functional, and probably not very fun.

What it boils down to is that I probably need more weapon, armor, spell and item types in order for the game to be really fun. My system is flexible enough that in order to add them, all I’d have to do is create new data files for them and expand my tile bitmap to include the new tiles for them…I’m hoping I have time to do it.

I’m very close to being able to look at, talk to and fight any person in the game. The code for all that is written from the NPC side; now I need to work on the input system so that the player can communicate his desire to look, talk or fight to the game.

Here’s how I’m planning to do my mouse-based player input. When the mouse pointer is not inside the map part of the screen, it’s a mouse pointer. You can use it to click on the save/load/quit buttons, click inventory items to arm them, click spell buttons to cast spells, or click on the interface buttons at the bottom of the screen to set a certain interface mode (look, talk or fight).

When the mouse pointer is inside the map part of the screen, by default it’s a “move” pointer. Clicking the left mouse button while the pointer is in this mode will cause the player to move one step towards the pointer. Right-clicking changes to “get” mode. Left clicking on an object will then get that object into the player’s inventory. Right-clicking again changes to “fight” mode. Left-clicking an NPC will attack that NPC. If you have the Smite spell, right-clicking changes to “cast” mode, allowing the player to cast Smite on any NPC on the screen. Right-clicking again changes the mouse to “look” mode. Left-clicking causes the player to look at whatever item the player clicks on. Right-clicking again changes to “talk” mode.

There will be interface buttons on the bottom of the screen so the player can play the game with just the left mouse button if desired (left click get, fight, cast, talk or look and then left click in the map area on what you want to do that on).

I’m going to try to support keyboard-only as well, but selecting stuff on a map with just a keyboard is kind of wonky (as anyone who played Ultima VI without a mouse will tell you).

It’s now been almost a week since I worked on my RPG, and if I don’t do something soon, I’m afraid I might just let the project lapse. I refuse to allow that to happen.

I intended to work on it over the weekend, but my son was sick. I will get some work on it done over the Thanksgiving weekend, however.

You probably already know this, but just in case you didn’t: Microsoft is making the Express versions of its Visual Studio development software free for a year. These are full-featured compilers for the Visual Basic, C++, C# and J# programming languages, and yes, you can make commercial software with them.

I don’t know why Microsoft hasn’t been doing this all along. One of the reasons I am where I am today was because I found a book that had a learning edition of Visual C++ 6 on it. The learning edition put a “Not for Commercial Use” popup at the beginning of every program you made for it, but was otherwise full-featured, giving me very valuable experience that later got me my first programming job. I always wondered why they didn’t make that edition available for free download from their web site.

Of course, this is probably Metrowerks’ worst nightmare, and this will probably coax the last few Borland users into the arms of the behemoth. Still, when the behemoth makes it easier to learn software development and reduces the development cost of making commercial software, you can’t help but be a little grateful.

I’m actually thinking about what my next 40-hour project will be. Even though I don’t have this one half-finished yet. I’ve got a couple different ideas: a 40-hour space opera RPG, a 40-hour real-time-strategy game, a 40-hour Master of Orion-style game or a 40-hour Civilization-style game. Maybe I should put up a poll

(Note: Sorry this wasn’t up yesterday…I came home from work and went right to bed.)

This is going far slower than I intended…I had only intended for this to be a two-week project. I’m now in my third week and haven’t even used up half my hours yet! Still, the project is progressing, and it’s looking more like a game all the time:

The game now loads maps created with the editor. The player may move around the map, and is blocked by impassable terrain, NPCs and monsters. The player may walk over items, however. The text system is in, allowing me to have a scrolling text area at the bottom of the screen.

However, the player may not talk to, look at, pick up or fight anything. In order to get those actions into the game I need to create the actual item, NPC and monster classes. That’s going to be a huge wodge of content. I’m expecting it to take about five hours.

Was feeling better, until I woke up this morning. Now I’m feeling much worse. Still went to work…Hit & Myth isn’t going to get done with me sitting at home, and I already took a sick day last week. Still, I did manage to get something done on the RPG this weekend, and there will be an update later today, I promise.

Sorry about the lack of posts and the lack of progress on the RPG. I haven’t been feeling well the last couple of days. Hopefully something will happen over the weekend.

I had originally planned to have the character moving across the map, monsters spawning and basic combat done by the ten-hour mark. I have failed at that, but I still think the project is on track. My editor turned out pretty darn good:

You’ll want to right-click and choose “View Image” to get the full effect.

The big work area on the left represents an entire 64×64 map on one screen – no scrolling. All the in-game terrain types and objects are icons in the upper-right. The numbers 1, 2, 4 and 8 control the brush size (only when painting terrain, of course). Save and load work perfectly, and the “Undo Item” and “Undo NPC” buttons allow you to undo the dropping of items and NPCs in the world.

I initially was going to have a set of “Clear to Terrain” buttons that would have given you an instant water, stone, grass or lava canvas to work on, but it’s almost as easy to just paint the map with the terrain you want using brush 8. I was also going to have a “New Map” button, but closing and reopening the program works just as well. The save buttons always saves to a map called “default.map”, and the load button loads this map, so once you’ve saved your work you’ll want to find that map and rename it to something else, lest your next save overwrite it. Very clunky, but just writing a simple system to input your save game name would have taken at least another half-hour. This is dirty, yet functional – exactly what I was shooting for.

There is one thing this editor doesn’t do, and that is map links. But coding that would take longer that just adding the links to the map by hand (most maps don’t have very many links) so I’m willing to call it done.

The map you see here was made in under five minutes.

Well, no wonder I’m not getting any comments! I had comments set to “must register” but wasn’t allowing anyone to register! I’m setting comment registration back to off for now…if I get the occasional comment spam I’ll just clean it. I’d much rather hear from the people who are reading this blog…if they are still out there

Thanks to Chris at Convene for alerting me that comments weren’t working.