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2013/03/08
Stealth
The Ranger tree got a new power this week: Stealth. We created it by abusing the "transform into a creature" code. It's a great demonstration of how flexible the game can be just through the data.
While stealthed you can either leave stealth or use a Sneak Attack -- a high-crit melee attack: animated gif of stealth and sneak attack on a goblin
Stealth is created as an enemy with unique art and several passive powers that work together. These passive decrease your threat range, decrease your movement speed, and increase your crit chance. Additional passives are used to trigger a countdown stealth timer and to break out of stealth when attacking or attacked.
Dev Lab
I'm working on a new set of maps that I hope to include in v0.18 (and will grow later). These maps are in a new mod called Dev Lab. It's an in-game tutorial with demo maps to show how to get started with modding. Advanced maps will show interesting ways to use creatures, events, traps, items, and powers to create unique experiences. Edit the Dev Lab maps directly in Tiled to see the code behind all the tutorial demos.
We think these in-game modding tutorials will be more engaging than articles or videos (and those can come later). Hopefully the Dev Lab will help people who enjoy playing Flare get into modding Flare.
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2013/03/06
March Forward!
Flare v0.18 is my March One Game A Month goal.
We've made tremendous progress in the engine since the last release. Version 18 will represent the final Alpha of the game. Flare v0.19 onward will be Beta for the engine -- a freeze on new features so that we can focus on making content and games for Flare 1.0!
Here are the target dates.
- March 15th: Feature and String Freeze
- March 30th: Release v0.18
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2013/03/01
Book of Lost Lore
My February #onegameamonth project is called Book of Lost Lore. It's a chapter of interactive fiction (much like Choose Your Own Adventure). The story is that of an aspiring adventurer in a dangerous fantasy world.
My main gamedev skills are programming first and 3D modeling second. This project uses neither of those. Instead it's basically all writing. I'm not great at writing so this was good practice that I'm hoping to put towards Flare.
If you're out there and aspire to be a game designer/writer but you have no programming or art skills: here's an example of a game type you can make on your own, right now.
I want to send out special thanks to catch the bear (Matthew Ohlendorf) for allowing the use of his songs from the album "down to sea in ships". I've been listening to his work often this month and it only felt right to put his music directly into the book.
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2013/02/19
Flare article at LinuxExpres
I found this great article about Flare by Pavel Petřík at LinuxExpres (Czech). It's a surprisingly in-depth look at an earlier version of Flare. If you've discovered Flare through this article, welcome!
Alpha work
We're still working on v0.18 data and features. I think we'll find a cut-off point soon and announce a potential release date. It will be the final "alpha" version of the game. After that we'll be in internal Beta.
Henrik has added a SoundManager class to Flare. This helps us streamline all sound effect loading/playing internally, and forces more consistency on data files. Next on that front we'll be sifting through the code for "hardcoded" sound effects and moving those to config files.
I've been working on models for some new Artifact trinkets. These will be animal carvings that grant +1 bonus to a core attribute.
- Bear Figurine +1 Physical (represents strength)
- Owl Figurine +1 Mental (represents intelligence)
- Cat Figurine +1 Offense (represents agility)
- Turtle Figurine +1 Defense
Here's a peek at the work-in-progress artifacts:
A small data change I did today is providing a purpose for gems. Now gems retain 100% of their value when selling. The gems represent denominations of gold: Sapphire 100g, Emerald 200g, Ruby 500g, Diamond 1000g. I've placed one of each gem on Kenrik the trader in the main town. Now players can buy gems as a way to save money to the Shared Stash (and prevent extra gold loss upon death).
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2013/02/18
Polymorphable wins a prize for the Liberated Pixel Cup!
Congrats to the Polymorphable crew for taking home the Secondary Prize for Teams in the Liberated Pixel Cup!
From the LPC results announcement:
Last but not least is our secondary prize for teams. Laurelia's Polymorphable Citizens comes in as an impressive single-player RPG. The game makes use of a modified version of the FLARE engine (if you haven't seen FLARE, well you should, because it's an incredibly impressive project… really great if you like dungeon crawlers). The game doesn't play like FLARE though; for one thing, instead of being an isometric game like FLARE, it has all the Liberated Pixel Cup look to it. And it works great! The game has a good story and some neat features. And as the title suggests, the game makes interesting use of a lot of transformation: in order to succeed in your task, you have to switch between the powers of various creatures!
It's an interesting game, and has a good sense of story and adventure, and cool to see the FLARE engine being put to different use. Check it out!
Wow! High praise for Polymorphable and for Flare as an engine. Congrats to Matthew Krohn and Thane Brimhall who created Polymorphable for the LPC. And additional thanks to these guys for all they've done to improve the core engine.
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