Been a bit ill the last couple of days, possibly from not getting enough sleep this weekend!

Just realised that the musaks from my last post didnt come through, so here they are.

https://soundcloud.com/#stevy-1/bit-metally

https://soundcloud.com/#stevy-1/horror-of-the-mountain-king

 

Here be Dragn: A Postmortem:

What went right:

The Dragon:

The Dragon looked and moved exactly how I wanted it to.. There are a couple of niggles when it coils around but otherwise its fun to move about and sinuous. It could have been a bit faster.

The AI:

I managed to put in some distinct AI units. The first makes the Dragon stick together in a follow pattern. The swordsman class makes the warrior cling closely to the dragon and attack with melee (though the actual melee wasnt finished!). I also added ability timeouts so the warrior could charge in when at close range. The archer class has three different range controls. At long range it closes to shooting range. At shooting range it shoots. At short range it runs away.

The Gamestate:

I managed to seperate the game entities into a seperate class and share this about, which was pretty good as I usually dont keep a MVC pattern and dump everything into one class.

The music:

Although the mountain king song went wrong and cost me time, the other song makes the game a bit better.

What went wrong:

Resources = time!

For a short game, I should have created rough resources and patched them up later.. Colours and special effects should only be added when you’re ahead on time! That dragon could have had lasers!

Art:

I drew more drawings than I actually got to use, which was a bit of a shame.. Though makes me wonder why I was spending time drawing horses anyway? The pipeline I was using to import the resources was also far too complicated as it involved a lot of manual work. On top of this, the warrior was cell shaded, and the dragon and ground were pseudo-realistic, leading to a bit of a jarring effect and making it non thematic.

Sound effects:

I rushed these at the last minute but making them all by voice changes the artistic direction of the game. I’m also aware that some of them were far too quiet or appeared at the wrong times, partly because of repeated conditions in the AI loop.

Do I want to work any more on it?

I’ve got some resources ready to animate and colour in.

I had a couple of interesting ideas while I was doing the compo which I would like to explore such as:

• Adding enemies and powerups to points in the music and adding different waves of enemies to show progress.
• Adding the storyline I had before, where your dragon wakes up to find it’s favorite gem gone and goes on a quest to get it back.

I think it would be a great testbed to try out some other concepts and refine my object handling in java (so it doesnt GC).