February Kickoff

January Wrap-up

In January the goal was to have a rough prototype of the battle game working in Unity, using a tileset to display the world, and controlling the player using the Unity UI.  Our current build we're able to Move, attack and use some of the basic abilities, despite a pretty rough user interface.

Since the holidays are over, I haven't had as much time for coding.  And lots of the work with Unity UI was simply experimenting with different techniques and APIs, so not all of it was directly productive.  But I think I have some good methods down now to do what I want (see the previous post on dynamic menus).

February Goals

By the end of February, I'd like to have a minimum viable pre-alpha build.  Here's what I'm shooting for:

• 2-3 battles with an assortment of players / enemies to test difficulty / tactics / AI.
• Functional menus for using Abilities, Items and changing equipment
• Win/Lose conditions and displays
• "Wrapper" menus that let you choose opponents, start battle, etc
• Indicators in the UI for range of spells, area of effect, failure to hit, etc
• More abstraction for loading resources from external files (maps, characters, tilesets, etc)

A more abstract goal I'll be working on in parallel:

• Start brainstorming the story, characters, lore and gameplay elements of the game itself.  This brainstorming will drive the design of the actual assets used in the final game: graphic design of UI, tilesets, music, gameplay abilities, writing, etc.

I'm not sure I'll do as much streaming this month.  For one, my laptop is somewhat weak, and the stream lags and skips.  And lots of the plumbing I'm doing right now is pretty repetitive, boring, and not worthy of watching for hours on Twitch.

Once I get more into the content creation and testing, I'll record some more videos and post them.