Tilting at Windmills

Happy Birthday to Me

Posted on July 17, 2019 by adamantyr

So yesterday was my birthday… I’m now level 44. Still saving up for my epic mount though. 😉

Other than aches and pains (my knee still is bugging me) and having to diet to lose some weight (which at least IS happening, I’m down 35 points from where I was in late May), I feel pretty good. Working in computer software and being around computers most of my life has already made me feel like an old man many times over, so I’m never bothered that I have computer magazines older than my co-workers.

The funny thing is, computer software changes but it also comes back around. In the early 80’s there were “RAMdisks”, a peripheral that mimicked a floppy disk drive but used static RAM chips. They were expensive but fast, so a lot of users had them. But when CD-ROM technology finally got out into mainstream, they were largely forgotten.

And what do we have today? Solid state drives, which are incredibly fast, all RAM, with no moving parts which makes them ideal for laptops and tablets. It’s the RAMdisk of old, re-packaged! Things like that help me feel like I’m not so much old as I can see the cycles of things that just come around again. It’s no wonder time is often viewed as a wheel in many cultures.

On the CRPG front, I slowed down a bit while I did some research of sorts for my underwater dungeon by playing some Bioshock. I’d never played the second or third one, and it was a nice way to recharge the creative batteries. I found Bioshock Infinite to be very good, although the ending was a little anti-climactic. Bioshock 2 was good but mostly derivative of the first one; you could just skip playing it entirely and never have missed anything. I have two maps left to populate with encounters and transactions, then I can move on to the 2nd of the final three dungeons.

Also, during my birthday my dad and I rebuilt the back patio deck on my house. I’d noticed the boards were looking rather ratty in places, and then in one corner, I felt a distinct crunch when I stepped on it. My dad, being a super handy guy (roofs, decks, house extensions, he’s done it all) came over and honestly did most of the work with me as an assistant. The new deck is twice as thick, covered in weather stain/sealant for maximum protection, and the lower struts have even been reinforced for sturdiness. Thanks, dad!

My goal is to be done with all my maps and working on getting the engine changes done for full support of all graphics by end of this month.

Posted in CRPG, Gaming, Personal, TI-99/4a | 4 Comments

Underwater Dreams

Posted on June 24, 2019 by adamantyr

I’ve been making excellent progress with the final world disk. One thing that helps with this is that a LOT of the map content is dungeons, which go a little faster to create than towns, where you have to write up dialogue, decide item prices, etc.

I’m on the first of three large final dungeons in the game, which is a sunken underwater city. This requires me to create some new fresh graphics, which has slowed me down a little. I also added a couple new monsters to keep things interesting.

A few engine updates made their way in as well. I changed how ranged weapons worked with ammunition so that I could more easily add new items to the game. A big update is coming to change the tile graphics for combat to match up again with my compression changes to add a new character set.

I’ve also devoted some attention to my documentation. Part of the beta testing will be having a complete and useful set of manuals. This requires me to have the engine mostly complete so the manual is up to date.

I also decided to expand the character level range from 1 to 16, instead of 10. I haven’t decided on experience progression quite yet, but my goal is to make it so you level up pretty quickly at the start, slow up at the middle, and getting the last few levels takes a LOT of time.

This also requires monsters to have a bell curve of strength as well. I realized when working on one of the dungeons that the party wouldn’t be getting there until late in the game. I had to make sure the monsters there were strong enough to be a challenge to the party.

Monsters don’t have “levels” per se, but I use an abstracted level value to help determine their statistics. Most of them should be in the middle level range of 6-10; presently I have 116 out of 206 there. Adjustments here will definitely be ongoing.

I got a big convention this upcoming weekend, so my tentative hope and plan is that by the end of July I can start some internal beta testing. If you’re interested in assisting in testing, please comment here and let me know!

Posted in CRPG, Design, TI-99/4a | 7 Comments

Third Base

Posted on May 30, 2019 by adamantyr

The third world disk is done at last! After over three months, ugh…

Yeah, that took longer than I thought. I did a lot of new tile graphics which slowed things down. I also completed all monster graphics as I went along; that was one of those tasks that was easy to switch over to when I wasn’t in the mood to write dialogue. Monster statistics are another story, but I’ve found the best way to do those is in beta-testing.

Out in real life, a lot of other things interrupted as well. Lots of stuff to get done around the house, a convention to attend, hurt my knee, finally am on a diet and trying to lose weight, etc.

The good news is, I just have one world disk left to go! I’ve already plotted out the dungeons and content pretty well, so there will be less to do, I think. I got some new graphics to do but not nearly as much.

One aspect of the 3rd disk was that I combined doing both mobs and transactions at the same time. This helped to move things along better, it’s also why the percentage complete remained identical between the two.

I did notice that drawing up all maps ahead of time created issues where I forgot what I was thinking with particular maps. I need a more integrated approach to ensure things get done, so I’ll be trying to do that with the 4th disk.

Posted in CRPG, Design, TI-99/4a | 5 Comments

Rogues Gallery

Posted on April 18, 2019 by adamantyr

Sorry for the long time between posts… I’ve been working hard at the 3rd disk’s contents. The Progress tab will tell you where I’m at!

In the meanwhile, I decided to write up a “monster graphics extractor” tool so I could generate a quick PNG file of all my monsters. It’s colorful and cool! The gaps you can see in various areas are where I have monsters planned that aren’t drawn yet

Posted in CRPG, Graphics, Screenshots, TI-99/4a | 4 Comments

Green Times

Posted on March 19, 2019 by adamantyr

Interesting times right now…

First we had St. Patrick’s Day. And Emerald City Comic Con, which naturally uses the color green rather heavily with the brand. And things are definitely greening up, Seattle hit a temperature high for the month of March the other day.

So to further celebrate, a green dragon I’ve been working on! I was aiming for a look closer to Singe from Dragon’s Lair (inspired by the most excellent cartridge version of this game recently released by Tursi for the TI-99/4a, a marvel of technological accomplishment!) but I think he came out looking pretty good.

May still need some tweaking… Or twerking.

Maps are basically done for 75% of the game now, time to turn my attention to scripting and mobs for a bit and get that part caught up.

Posted in CRPG, Design, Personal, Screenshots, TI-99/4a | 2 Comments

Sand Slogging

Posted on March 5, 2019 by adamantyr

Been awhile since I’ve posted, so here’s where we are…

Work has slowed down as I’ve entered the second half of the game’s content. It was bound to happen, unfortunately.

Part of this is due to the necessity of creating new graphics for maps that only existed as concepts. I also decided, as the maps I was working on had a distinctly “Arabian Nights” feel, that I wanted some more graphics to make the maps more interesting. (low tables, cushions for seats, rugs, etc.)

This had me thinking at one point, why not just dynamically load patterns for maps? Each map would have a tile set and then run-length-encoded map data, possibly followed by elevation in one huge block. There would be a slight delay as it built the character set out but then I could literally have any tile I wanted on any map.

I decided not to do it, at least for now. Creating maps in such a system would be a major pain in the ass.

You would have to designate what tiles you wanted before you started even drawing it.
The map editor would be a major pain to write; I may have to resort to writing an external C# tool to do it instead of on the TI itself
Animated tiles becomes messy and potentially a problem. Right now it’s hard-coded for speed and efficiency
Compression of maps is nice but not strictly necessary, I got plenty of disk space

Maybe for a sequel I could do something like this but for now I think I can get by without it.

The other slow going work is the quests and story-line, which were broadly written but lacked detail. (Rather like how George Lucas had a rough idea of what was going to happen in the prequels early on but no concrete story.) Now I have to actually sit down and think and fill things in.

Part of this also requires some research on my part. My favorite resources for historical and mythological information are, not surprisingly, RPG game books! Steve Jackson Games produced a huge number of world books for their GURPS system in the 1990’s, and all of them are invaluable sources of information on not just gaming but cultural aspects of the settings.

I try and keep my Progress page updated with the latest numbers, so stay tuned!

Posted in Assembly, CRPG, Design, TI-99/4a | 3 Comments

Two Nearly Down, Two to Go

Posted on February 10, 2019 by adamantyr

I’m now in the process of wrapping up the second world disk… There’s a few transactions to write up, I need to finish populating the map headers with character and monster data, and I need to add the tile set data to the program file, so it knows this blocks sight, this makes that sound when you step on it, and so forth.

I’m glad I took the time to create a map extractor tool. Seeing the finished maps just auto-generated and including a black and white version is just neat! I’m considering adding a monochrome option to the game, just for fun.

As I was working, I realized I needed to make an infrastructure change. I’m going to have the game store all mobs for the current world disk in memory. That increases load time for loading and saving games, but it will give me the ability to allow the game to be restored to points before events that significantly altered the game. The more I’ve worked on this the more I’ve realized that modern gamers expect the equivalent of an “undo” button, and with the SAMS card I do have the memory to make this happen.

I live in western Washington so it looks very likely I’ll be snowed in most of the week… Hopefully that means I can make some great progress with this!

Posted in CRPG, Design, Screenshots, TI-99/4a | Leave a comment

Snowed In

Posted on February 4, 2019 by adamantyr

So during yesterday’s Super Bore, er, Bowl, and overnight, I got 8+ inches of snow. Needless to say I was working from home today. 🙂

I spent a good part of my time during the football game working on a couple of new C# utilities, one that would extract and create a graphics PNG from my game file, and the other which would auto-generate maps from my map data using that PNG file. I’ve been spending far too much time saving screenshots in the emulator and pasting them together in MS Paint to create map images. So now I got an automatic tool which generates them, both in color and black and white. 😀

In case you’re wondering WHY I need map images, my editors on the TI are limited to the 32 column screen, and really limited with slanted maps. As a result, I often can’t see the entire map and get a feel for if it’s large enough, or TOO large, and where things are. Having map images helps me with my planning. Plus BW images will come in handy when I get around to writing up a hint book, I’m sure. 🙂

I’ve completed all the maps for the 2nd World part now, I’m now working on finishing mobs and transactions. This is where I often find I need to add or remove things, because I realize I need something to spruce things up somewhere. I was working on a cavern that was just for transition from one point to another, and I had a great idea for adding some specific monsters to it to make it a “special” location with a bit of a story to it.

The slowest part are the mobs, because I have to constantly look at the map to get coordinates, and I often decide treasure at that moment as well. I do placeholders as much as possible just to get data in place, but I want to limit that if I can. Many times with the first set of world content I found things I had forgotten to populate and now I had to do the work to make it look right.

Posted in CRPG, Design, Personal, TI-99/4a | Leave a comment

Centralize and Reorg

Posted on January 29, 2019 by adamantyr

I had no idea I had so many maps to draw… It’s definitely taking longer than I thought!

I started on the 2nd disk’s contents, but I’m jumping all over to start the 3rd and 4th as well. In particular, I’m working on designing the world map so I can see “the whole” of the game at a glance.

The realms, pieced together! Just a few left to do…

One advantage of this approach is identifying some bottlenecks. For example, I originally had monster graphics split up among the world disks, each disk having a separate list. This was when I was attempting to keep the game playable on a 180K disk system.

I no longer need to segregate monsters, and I can actually combine the data and graphics files and keep them in one place. This has the following advantages:

I can load any monster anywhere in the world
I don’t need to replicate graphics or statistics, which means constantly updating them as I make tweaks and changes to battle balance
I can consolidate creating monster content in one phase, rather than having to start over each time

Once I get the world map complete, I can return focus to finishing up the 2nd disk’s contents. I’m mostly finished with transactions, but maps and mobs take considerably longer than expected to map out and write up…

Posted in CRPG, Design, Screenshots, TI-99/4a | 6 Comments

Big Tasks

Posted on January 14, 2019 by adamantyr

Still grinding away at maps… I managed to pick up a cold this weekend that grounded me at home, but as soon as I had energy I was back at it!

A particular slow-down is for some of the maps, I need to create new graphics. I had several “special” sets that are only used for particular situations, and the time has come for me to actually draw them out.

This is part of what I think is fun about CRPG’s. You set expectations early (“Oh yeah, more hills and mountains, seen that kind of building before…”) then break them. (“Whoa, what the heck is this place?!”) Leave the players guessing as to what could happen down the road.

It’s a bit of a spoiler, but one thing I just decided tonight, and will need to make coding changes for potentially, is to have “giant” size mobs, which are 2 tiles tall, 1 tile wide. This lets me have “giants” who have their own land and places have a bit of scale to set them apart from the rest of the maps. It should really give you a sense of how “big” a problem you have. 😉

I’ve done some transaction write-ups as well, but the current ones went quickly because I had plotted text some time ago in a spreadsheet. After an early set of maps, I’ll be writing new material. I’ve had plots and ideas in my head for years, now is the time to commit them to a text file and see how they fly…

That’s part of the CRPG design process, honestly. You need to be able to change, alter, and update material as you go along, because you’ll have new ideas. You’ll realize there’s not enough information being provided in one place so you need to add a new NPC to tell the players something. Or you’ll realize some plot idea is overly complicated or has been done elsewhere, so you trim it back or remove it entirely.

It’s an organic process, and probably the biggest reason I haven’t started sharing it yet for testing is that it’s still incomplete. You can taste the stew before it’s ready but you don’t want people seeing the bones you’ve added or removed. 🙂