I feel like this month I had a lot to do and did some interesting stuff on my capstone for my Master’s Degree, I wanted to have them in this post but due to virtual paperwork, I’m not ready for that yet!

Aglarond

Getting straight into meaty content, I didn’t work on Aglarond for about 2 weeks, the project didn’t have any progress between September 26th and October 7th. And also I am rewriting the Dungeon Generation System, which I estimate one week of work time, with all that, Aglarond should probably be delayed for 3 weeks! With all that being said, Aglarond is still a 2~3 month scoped game and I want something that small because I knew delays probably would happen, because of school and whatnot, but still the game should be released before the end of the year, that is the ultimate goal.

Right below you can see how the dungeon was before rewriting it, I have the turn-based system in place, the dungeon generation and the field of view, these are the 3 pillars of a roguelike! So I’m into something already.

I wrote a blog post about Tiles and Field View for Aglarond (click to see).

The problem with the previous Dungeon System is that it used a maze algorithm for the connections between rooms, I honestly don’t know why I thought that would be a good idea, it led to uninteresting and excessively long maze-like paths in the dungeon, which were just boring.

I’m switching to the approach used by Brogue, which is basically (i) create a room with positions that can be doors (I call them door candidates) (ii) add a room to it (iii) repeat ii until the dungeon is complete. A room can be a square room, a circular room, and they can have a hallway. You can see a screenshot of it below, currently, it just create rooms and connect them based on the door candidates for it, but it is way better already.

The next step for Aglarond is making the rooms created more interesting, which means adding variety to how they are and adding hallways. After that, I have the three core features of a roguelike in place: Combat System, Dungeon Generation and the Field of View. After that I should start working on a simple item system and have it in place so you can find scrolls and potions in the dungeon, that would make the game more interesting.

AND AN IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: I was going through Brogue’s source code and have been playing it a lot lately, that’s when I realized how complex the systems and all the interactions can be in a roguelike. I wanted to have all the complexity on Aglarond but I also didn’t want to blow scope, everything I have planned is not even 20% of what a complex roguelike has, and I would like to have all that. Roguelike development is very iterative in its nature and every tutorial or talk focuses on having the basic core gameplay and then adding whatever form of complexity you want on that.

That’s when I decided that I want to try making Aglarond some sort of life long project, that’s what a lot of roguelikes are after all, so the basic core gameplay would be released and I would keep working on updates as time goes by. Everyone that buys the game will have access to all future updates!

Card Game!

The reason Aglarond didn’t see much work done for some time was because I was making a Card Game prototype! I made it based on this online course and first I made exactly as the course said and did, and then I rewrote the entire code to my syntax, my standards, etc…

There are still many things that I have to approach and fix, a lot of the systems in the game are strongly tied together, and I can see a thousand ways how that could be a problem in the future, I want to fix a lot of animation, elements positioning and refactoring code, making the systems more loose, I don’t exactly when I will do that, but that’s what I want.

There are many reasons why I suddenly made this Card Game prototype, first, I always wanted to try doing it, second, I love Hearthstone (the prototype is basically a Hearthstone clone), third, I pitched a card game for the studio I’m working on for my capstone in my Masters Degree, so I wanted to have a prototype to show I could actually do it and convince artists and designers to want to make the game, the idea was well-received, but when we talk about really making a card game in a studio, there are some considerations that needs to be done, such as, “How can I guarantee this will be within scope?”, “How will I address AI?”, “What are the cards going to be and how can we adapt the card art style for the artists we have?”, and, most important of all: “How this is not just a bad Hearthstone clone”

These are things I still have to answer, but hey, a little of polish and fixes and it can be at least a portfolio piece! Or I can end up making a card game in the future, who knows.

That’s it for this month’s update! I will try to keep focused only on Aglarond, but there are plenty of other side projects coming up that I might tackle, especially considering I need to improve my C++ skills, Gameplay Demos on Unreal might be appearing here next month!