New House Style and the Elevation System

Massive update post this time. I've been busy putting the Elevation system into play with the use of a new 'Sand' style house. This style of house will be the design that Skaerijj use as their homes. I was going for a sort of desert/arabian style, the graphics for the houses are far from finished but at a completed enough stage to demonstrate. I've still got to create all the little details for the houses like tent flaps hanging off the side of the house and gutters etc. And I've yet to design a new door for them if it will have doors at all, have not decided yet.

What I've designed is a house that has a flat walkable roof with stairs on the outside of the house to get up onto it. The elevation system works with this house by triggering an 'event' that increases the players elevation allowing the roof to display while over it.

I'm currently uploading a new video demonstrating the new features/graphics.

The major notes to make about this update is the alterations to the collision map. Originally there was only one collision map, now I've rewritten the entire content pipeline to load a collision map for every layer with their own elevation. The reason for this major overhaul is because there was going to be an issue of collision data on the ground layers blocking the player from moving while on the roof or vice versa.

I've also added a new 'Event Layer' map to each layer as well that records any event triggers and their effects. This is currently used only to increase/decrease player elevation but in the future will be used to trigger many different kind of events such as displaying dialogs or playing particular sounds.

By now the large scale maps I'm using are taking a very long time to save so next thing I'm going to work on is a progress bar for when saving and loading maps, just so I know its still doing something and not just crashed as the whole game feels like its stopped working when saving.

anyway, check out the new video when it shows up.

Sprites and the Content Pipeline

Been awhile since I've last posted. I've been spending the couple of days getting my head around how to work with the content pipeline in regards to saving and loading of npcs and other sprites using XML documents. Its been very complicated work and a nightmare debugging but I'm proud to announce that I've implemented the ability to save and load npcs and other sprites using the content pipeline successfully which brings me to my next announcement:

Houses! I've designed some Ultima7 perspective style wall and roof graphics and added support to create houses through the editor. I didnt make up a new video demonstration this time as creating a house is quite a time consuming process at the moment but I've added a new screenshot that shows a simple, already created house.

For now I'm going to work on speeding up the creation of houses as right now it does take a long time, they use pixel perfect positioning instead of clipping to the tile grid as the walls are a different shape to the tiles. But perhaps I'll work on making it so the walls clamp together when nearby each other to get positioning correct instead of carefully placing each wall exactly right.

And thanks for those who helped out with the sprite flickering issue, its now also been resolved.

NPC Editor functions implemented

another step towards completing the editor, the ability to add NPCs to the game through the editor is implemented. I've created another video demonstrating the new NPC component and actually adding them to the tilemap. check it out under development videos on the right.

It starts by displaying the NPC component of the editor when you click the npc add mode button where before it will let you add npcs to the tilemap you must make sure to enter all required details such as the npc name and what script file it will be using as well as the graphic to intially use. It then allows adding npcs to the tilemap by placing the middle of the sprite graphic in the precise position of the mouse cursor.

Features to be added soon:

* Buildings, trees and other objects
* Player stats
* Combat and utilizing the quick slots (actionBar) with a basic attack ability.

with that done I believe I'll take a break from the programming side of things to get some more tiles and graphics sorted out.

What is Destined Rings

Destined Rings is a real time RPG being created with inspiration from the classic game Ultima 7, still believed by many to be one of the best PC rpgs of all time.

It is a story about prophecies and how they are not always what you believe them to be. Set in a fantasy background Destined Rings follows the turning point of a young woman's life when she finds herself the victim of a dark prohecy where she is believed to be the cause of the imminent destruction of all life. Sending her on a fast paced journey of survival, discovery of an ancient past and the destined fullfillment of a prophecy the world is determined to prevent.

Destined Rings combines all your favourite fantasy races such as Elves and Dwarfs yet adds a few of its own, including a race designed in the popular anime style of half human, half cat, the Skaerijj Empire will play a major role in the development of the story.


Stay tuned for more posts to come, I'll be releasing more background information about the game over time.

Blog underway

Hello all, finally got around to creating this blog. I'm planning to use it to create a journal of the development progress of Destined Rings, my computer Roleplaying Game (RPG) that I am developing.

The game is still in a very early development stage, I've added a video demonstrating what has been implemented so far. Basically I've added the beginnings of an overlay (HUD) for both the game and editor and am working on implementing the editor menu options with New Map and New Layer dialogs completed already.

I've got help from an artist to create custom high-quality sprites to replace the temporary ones that I currently use as a placeholder to get things underway.

Anyway, I'll post more about the actual game concepts soon.