Development Stride

The past month I have hit an amazing development stride on Crea. I am more focused than I have ever been and continue to make unbelievable progress. I am utterly obsessed. When Kelley takes me out on my daily walk I have a hard time not talking about Crea and an even harder time not thinking about it. If this is the price for raw productivity then I’ll take it!

During this stride I have tackled some major issues. One example, which I mentioned in my last blog post, I completely rewrote all of the user interface code. Since that post I have written all of the previously implemented game UI which includes the crafting, equipment, inventory and toolbar. While doing this I was sure to polish some features and move them much closer to “complete”. Such as I finally added the concept of learning item recipes to be able to craft them. Or I made it so that ctrl+click on equipment will automatically swap it with your currently equipped item.

Another major feat is that I rewrote the world generation. In an earlier post I talked about optimizing the world generation and how it was just too slow. I decided to completely get rid of the random noise and go with using stamps to build up a world. This was a HUGE success and generating a small world went from about 45~ seconds to now 3~ seconds. Even a humongous world, 16384×3072 tiles only takes about 15~ seconds to be generated. Not only is it much faster, but we also now have much more control over the shape of the world.

There are lots of other smaller changes that have been happening which are mostly cataloged in our project plan. On there you can also see some of the tasks I have coming up. The next two big ones are Dynamuse and Combat Refinement.

Dynamuse is a little application I’m putting together for Robot Science to be able to compose tracks that will be dynamically generated during gameplay based off of a few parameters such as the time of day and the intensity of the situation. The motivation behind this is to avoid extremely repetitive music that you inevitably mute.

The Combat Refinement is a little more vague and I will likely do an entire post on the topic at some point. We have very basic combat implemented at the moment. You are able to swing a sword, very similar to Terraria’s long swords, and hit monsters. It is functional but not quite what we want. My goal for combat is to be a little more involved and skill based rather than “click-click-click-cli-cli-click”.

One of the biggest challenges with combat in a sandbox game is that the world can be reconstructed and, if we’re not careful, could easily mean some monsters are unable to even reach a player. So, some of the things we are looking at are: monster mobility, range attacks, multiple attack animations for a single type of weapon, skill and magic types. It is a lot but I have a good feeling we’ll be looking back at it before too long thankful that we took the time to refine things.

Oh and I’m still doing livestreams everyday. Feel free to drop in anytime!