solved wrote:

What about making the player discover that there is a king/leader of the monsters? While searching for the leader, one more and more see a huge conspiracy to bring humans back in slavery and murder the wise king of the humans.

So were the monsters and humans living together in peace before the leader started a war?

Yeah, but maybe in two different kingdoms or dimensions?

solved wrote:

Yeah, but maybe in two different kingdoms or dimensions?

Oh, that can tie in nicely the phantom shadows and the stone runes! How about the monsters are from a different dimension and found their way into the world of the humans through a portal, similar to the stone runes the shadows used to get to the human world. Maybe the end-goal of the game is to find and destroy the portal to the monster dimension?

Yes, that sounds great.

Ok, so the timeline would look something like this:

1. The kingdom is at peace, ruled by a king and protected by royal knights
2. For generations there is no conflict so people forget how to fight and don't know danger
3. Meanwhile, in the demon realm, the boss (a dragon?) prepares to invade the human world
4. Suddenly, a portal opens up in the human world and an army of monsters marches out
5. The unprepared human armies are wiped out and people flee to small villages in the countriside to hide
6. In one village a portal shows up in stone runes, connecting the human world to the shadow realm
7. Game start

PaulRHJT wrote:

solved wrote:

Yeah, but maybe in two different kingdoms or dimensions?

Oh, that can tie in nicely the phantom shadows and the stone runes! How about the monsters are from a different dimension and found their way into the world of the humans through a portal, similar to the stone runes the shadows used to get to the human world. Maybe the end-goal of the game is to find and destroy the portal to the monster dimension?

Oooohh… but then, destroying the monster portal (destroying all the monsters as well) would destroy the shadow's portal as well. The player could make a choice - should the shadows sacrifice themselves to stop the monsters0, or eternally try to protect the humans?

That could make an interesting bit of storyline.

Or the shadows could come out of the same portal as the monsters…

I wouldn't do the decision part of your suggestion,mooseman, but the rest is perfect. I think that would actually make sense and be a great end

Okay, that's a good storyline to work with. What decisions will the player be able to make? Right now we have a simple choice at the start of the game (protect the weak, resolve conflict, destroy evil), but I created that as a way to test the choice scripts rather than an important part of the storyline. I'd like the player to be able to make a couple choices that will affect the outcome of some questlines and what the humans think of you.

We could make it so you could talk to the villagers - we could use the choice script to simulate what you say.
But that would require a complete overhaul of the villager script, as well as an NPC engine (maybe?)

No, we do'nt necessarily need a complete overhaul. We could calculate their hitbox and allow talking with them that way. However, I might rescript our entire worldrenderer to work faster some time soon. I think we should wait for that until adding even more calculations or clones.

solved wrote:

However, I might rescript our entire worldrenderer to work faster some time soon. I think we should wait for that until adding even more calculations or clones.

Yea, I really like the villager idea but optimising some of the code first seems like a good idea. Right now the game runs poorly on Google Chrome (especially on Windows) and pretty good on Safari and Firefox. Any idea on how to optimise the code exactly? I'd like to help with that too

I want to give every item in the list an exact position so we don't need to run through the entire list every second and instead just calculate the objects on the screen. It is basically my FastTiles concept (link here!) without y-dimension (as it's a 2D Game and the objects doesn't differ in their y-position). If we added this system it's very easy to add interaction to every part of the map. We may even be able to delete the extra sprite for buildings

That sounds brilliant! I might be able to apply a similar limit to monster behaviour - i.e. if monsters are not on screen, their AI doesn't have to run (except wandering)

PaulRHJT wrote:

That sounds brilliant! I might be able to apply a similar limit to monster behaviour - i.e. if monsters are not on screen, their AI doesn't have to run (except wandering)

Yeah, that sounds like another huge step to reduce lag and improve the game experience by doing so.

Hey guys, I need your feedback on the shop interface design. Please see the designs below and tell me which one you prefer. In all cases you would be able to see item information by hovering your mouse over the item.

1. Text choice-based interface

When talking to a shopkeeper, they will ask you if you want to buy or sell items. You make your choice with the text choice engine. Three items will appear at the top of the screen, and you can scroll left and right to see more. Wen you select an item, the shopkeeper will ask if you want to trade it. Again, you can make a choice with the text choice engine.


2. Grid-based interface

In this interface, all items appear in a grid. There are two tabs (buy & sell) that you can switch between. You trade items simply by clicking on them. We could add a “ask: are you sure you want to trade this item?” block if necessary. You exit the menu with the button on the bottom of the interface.

3. Exchange interface

Here your inventory appears at the top. You can click on an item and then press the sell button to sell it. Alternatively, you can click on one of the shopkeeper's items on the bottom and then press buy to buy it. You can exit the menu with the button at the bottom of the interface.

I personally like the ‘Exchange interface’ the most :).

Here's something I want to inform you about:
I am currently working on a new map-drawer. It is currently really, really fast ( Yeah! ), but there are some problems with stamping the objects in the right distance and smoothly scrolling them to the sides. That's why I definitely need more time to complete this system, so please don't edit the map-drawer if it's possible. We can just drag the new map-drawer sprite in the newest project version then.

Some further comments:
1) I changed the screen to only update if the player is moving. There are some problems with the humans (We need to redraw the whole screen to update the humans correctly) though, that's why I think we should just limit how often humans are drawn per second.
They don't have a smooth movement/animation anyways.
2) I am heavily working on getting the old world compatible with the new system (It's not as easy as it sounds)
3) You can't place two objects at the same spot on the grid yet. I think we need that for the flag and the tree in the tutorial, don't we?
4) Our game actually runs very poor using the Chrome browser. Well, good news is that the new map-drawer seems to fix the lag issue for me!

Great to hear you've been busy! I can't wait to try out the improved map drawer!

1) I changed the screen to only update if the player is moving. There are some problems with the humans (We need to redraw the
whole screen to update the humans correctly) though, that's why I think we should just limit how often humans are drawn per second.
They don't have a smooth movement/animation anyways.

If we're making humans interact-able objects like mooseman said, we might as well put them in a separate sprite (or add them to the building sprite) and code them as clones. The map drawer can then be used for static objects only.

3) You can't place two objects at the same spot on the grid yet. I think we need that for the flag and the tree in the tutorial, don't we?

Depending on how your map drawer works exactly, we might be able to avoid this problem by shifting the costume position slightly. So you could have the tree and the flag at different ScrollX positions, but they appear to be in the same spot.

Well, the map-drawer for only static objects is a great idea, but I am most likely going to publish a testversion with the limited human updates per second as well. We should try to limit the amount of running scripts and clones wherever we can.
I thought of shifting the costume, too. However, I might need to replace all objects on the map for that and that's quite difficult because of the way bip901 first implemented the map-drawer… I think I'm just going to rebuild the map from ground up, give it a new coordinate system starting with 0 and not with -900 and change the scale a bit. I am going to have a closer look on that tomorrow.

Quite a lot of things rely on the current ScrollX coordinates, so don't worry about fixing all of the things that break when you implement the new system. I'm more interested to see if your map drawer speeds up the game. Once we know it does, we can work together to fine-tune all the sprites