Hello World

It's been some time again. It's been some time... Such is a busy life.

I've made some progress in the months since. Mostly finished all my refactoring. Hard to tell from the front of the game, but the back looks alot better haha. I would say the code is more healthy. A healthy green bean fighting machine. I owe some of this to doxygen for generating this website. It's helped me document my code base and visualize the heirarchy some more.

I actually managed to get smooth portals. That was hard. And I spend a month or two on the planets update! And finally I got skinning to be lessy buggy as it uses voxel data directly to generate weights. I edited basically every file in the 80k line code base. I mean, there was alot of cleaning up old code. I fixed some bugs in the process. More importantly it should be way easier to add new things with such a clean and organized library.

Lists of lists

I've actually got a roadmap on GitKraken. However I also like to scribble my todos on paper in the morning as it helps me think things through. Overall i'm excited about my game's design as it's very ambitious. However it doesn't quite hit the levels needed of an RPG yet.

I feel I need to get combat really interesting before I move on to slice of life features like farming and towns foke. Mostly because it's an RPG and combat is the centre point.

Plans of no Plans

I don't think I can stick to a time line as it's too hard to predict long term things when iteration of the game changes requirements based on how things turn out. It's a constant process of reflection and revision. This is the reason I like game development in the first place. It's a creative process and thoroughly enjoyable.

But I do have my lists and I tend to stick to them pretty well. There's alot more things I think up on the spot to fix while play testing, and it doesn't need a new task. So it tends to be scribbed around on paper or notepad and done at the time.

The hardest part is changes that take part accross dozens of files. Which is a fair amount of refactoring tasks. Data flow itself goes through many systems before it has a final impact on the screen.

This makes ECS feel like i'm working on a huge machine, fixing cogs here and there and seeing how the whole thing runs. It's quite a process but when it runs it goes like a jet engine.

Return of Zoxel

Back to Zoxel, I wouldn't say the core loop is done yet. There's a few things left. Classes, Jobs, Skills. Core gameplay stuff that I am still working on atm. I just refactored Items and Skills to use entities over the old storage. This makes it way easier to customize. I still need to work out the best way to refactor stats as well. I still need to add stats to the hats. I added generated hats as well.

For generation of Vox models and textures, in the future I should create a Visual Node editor. This way I can control the process a little bit better than currently in code. Or... I'll just hook it up to my neural nets.. Mwahahahahaha.

So yeah for the next several months, my plan is roughly

• Readd Biomes
• Readd Towns
• Add new Stats - Survival - Movement - Physical Damage
• Combat to Feel better - Camera Shake - Blood Overlay - Decals
• Wild Goblins
• Class Unique Skill Trees
• Basic Achievement Systems (chop 100 trees)
• Job - Levels - Skill Tree - Skills
• Basic Gameplay Synch for networking
• Dungeons and Portals to them
• More music Variation - Including Combat music
• More Quests and Dialogue Variation
• More Skills
• Fire - Spreadable in grass and trees
• AI Pathing and better aiming
• AI to call for help
• AI to flee in fear
• Emoticons above NPCs
• Basic Crafting
• Redo Equipment in the form of humanoid
• Map to point to quest locations