What’s next
My goal right now is to get Ano Sekai to a point where I can show off all of the core features. Right now I’m working on the Town Building game stage. Now that I have NPCs spawning around a Town Center block, I have several directions I can go in:
- Monster spawning and interaction
- Levelling up of town
- Interacting with NPCs
The most interesting thing to do right now is clearly the Monsters. I didn’t really talk much about the monsters themselves yet, have I?
Spawning
I was thinking about starting with the Minecraft method and working with that. The rules are easy: Every once in a while, try to spawn a monster at some distance from the player, in some random direction, but not too close. An additional rule will need to be that monsters should not be allowed to spawn within the Town Limit. (I’m letting NPCs spawn near the player, but I’ll be changing that.)
So the game has decided where it wants to spawn a monster, but what will it spawn? In this case the town level will be a big part of the decision. Each town level will have a set of monsters to choose from, where higher levels will have stronger and more difficult monsters to deal with. I won’t have to deal with that until I start working on the town levelling, though.
The actual number of monsters that will be allowed to spawn will have to be decided on during playtesting, as will the spawn distance and rate.
If you’re far from the town, the decision will have to be made differently, but that’s the next stage and I’ll leave that design for later as well.
Monster AI
Part of the task of building and maintaining a town is to defend it and its people from monsters. Some monsters will be more aggressive than others, some will be more dangerous than others, and some will try to literally destroy your town. You’ll want to build your town in such a way as to keep your NPCs and buildings safe from harm.
The first monster that will appear in the game is going to be the Blue Slime. If you’ve seen my actionRPG project, you’ll already know what it looks like. I’m going to be putting a little more work into the AI this time, though. In Ano Sekai, the slimes will act like the slimes in Terraria. I don’t know for sure, but they seem to have been based on Zelda II’s slimes, and that’s what I’ve always been looking at as the AI model for the slimes.
The Blue Slime will move around at random, but will only move in short 1/4 block high hops. It will take 2-4 small hops in one direction, and then stop for some amount of time. It will then pick a new direction at random and hop in that direction. If it runs into higher ground, it will hop up a full block but at half the forward move speed.
That will be its non-aggressive state. When it can see an NPC or the player and is close enough, it will become aggressive and chase whoever it has targeted. It will still do the same thing as before, the difference will be that it will always hop towards its target. When it can’t see its target anymore, or the target goes outside of its aggression range, it will return to its non-aggressive state and once again move in random directions.
Inter-Entity interactions
When two entities touch one another, something may or may not happen. There needs to be functionality to check for collisions between all entities, and functionality to cause a reaction in some of those cases. I bring it up here because I’m going to want to be able to tell when a slime is touching the player or an NPC, so that I can code a reaction to it.
I guess that ideally, if the slime touches any entity that isn’t also a slime, it should deal damage to it. There will be exceptions, such monsters made of stone or metal, or dragons. Taking damage will involve causing a knockback state, and reducing health by some amount.
I want to introduce health bars to the game at this time as well. Health bars will be shown over all entities as you would expect to see in an RTS, as a green bar perhaps with black or red to show how much health has been lost. Right now I’m thinking about FFXII because I’m replaying it off and on at the moment.
Once an NPC’s health has been reduced to zero, I want to kill it. At that point there won’t be any way to fight back other than to build. Once NPCs can be killed, it will be time for me to code in a way to fight back! The player will be given an arcing sword that will deal damage to the slimes and knock them back.
As I build things, I’ll be sure to post about them. Look forward to it!
Image may be NSFW.
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Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
