I've added some more graphics, and improved the monster pathfinding performance. Now there are 50 confused imps on the starting map, moving randomly. Combat has been expanded a bit, physical damage is now actually calculated, and there are very simple effects indicating if you hit an imp. No death animation though, so the imps just vanish upon the final hit. The imps have 20 hitpoints and don't fight back at the moment.
I've published a new release, since a lot of changes had been accumulating up. Many of them are just added artwork, but there are a few functional changes too.
- On my laptop it didn't reach 60 FPS. I have tried to optimize the display code, so it's back at 60 FPS again, even on the laptop, but I want to investigate this further because auch a simple map display should not need so much computation power.
- The basics of combat are implemented. Actually you don't see much of that in the demo, just if you hit the imp, it vanishes. But code structures are prepared to handle damage and defense calculations, so the only thing left to do there is to decide how to do those calculations (blocking, armor effects, elemental vs. physcial damage ...)
- The basics of player and monster speed handling are there now. Movement speed is prepared to no longer depend on the framerate but on passed time, but it needs more work. The imp is slower than the PC now, so one can actually chase and hit it.
- A few fixes went into the item prefix and postfix code. "Vorpal Sandals" with 58% enhanced damage looked too odd. (Sandals could get any magic enhancement).
- The map movement grid became finer. As a side effect I had to redo the village map, so that looks a bit different now than before. I hope I can stick with the chosen grid now.
I'm not sure what I'l do next, but I assume I will enhance the dungeon populating code, both with monsters and furniture, implement some real combat system, and also merchants for the village map and an item trading system. I also want to give the monsters some AI, to make them "live" in the dungeon, that is seek places to rest and sleep, wells to drink from, look for food or equipment (if intelligent).
I've got one more planet to convert, an earth type planet. I'll make a sheet with all the planet types and upload that. Might take a day or two, weekends I'm usually busy with real life duties.
It's mostly there to give some sense to acid based attacks. All the other elemental attacks just hurt the PC, and acid togetrhe with item durability will add a different sort of challenge. I think the tricky point is to balance it right - have enough of it, to make it interesting, but not so much that it becomes an annoyance.
I've implemented the effect so that above 50% of durability, the item will work fully, and below 50% durability the damage or defense will lower proportionally. Items won't break totally at the moment, but become useless (0 damage or 0 defense).
Also I want to say thanks to the people who made the flare armor set public domain. That's great artwork! I'm currently adapting and importing the images, some are already in, as the screenshot shows.
That's right. I'm not even sure how to do that ... but this might work:
1) Get the lastest release, because it includes the LWJGL and rlgamekit libraries which you need to compile the sources.
2) Compile everything from the src folder into a new JewelHunt.jar - this will require to set up the paths to the LWJGL and rlgamekit libraries in your IDE
3) Replace the JewelHunt.jar from the release with your own version.
@ceninan: D2 had an "industructible" item mod, that becomes much more interesting if items have a finite life. An idea that I might pursue is that each repair attempt lowers the max durability of an item, so there is fixed limit of repairs. This way items will last quite long, but not forever.
Psychologically I'm slightly opposed to this idea, I like to keep things forever :D
Nethack and some more roguelikes also come with a very limited supply of items, so the player must carefully choose what to use. It seems to work, and some people like this sort of challenge.
@Malifer: I think I'll have to keep things simple, but I agree with the ideas there, that's quite close to my own ideas. The crafting idea is nice, did not think fo that yet :)
A long while I was pondering about item durability, and how to make it interesting in the game. Also, I wanted to have enemies with attacks that damage some items, e.g. if you hit an acidic enemy with a metal sword, the sword will take some damage. Which would be totally uninteresting if such damage had no effect.
The current plan is to lower item efficiency if the durability drops below 50%. That is, the item will work fine above 50% durability, and below the efficiency will drop, weapons will do less damage and armor or shields will be less protective.
This also will put some emphasis on repairs, repair skills or NPCs who can repair items.
I hope it won't become a chore for the player to keep equipment in shape, but rather adds to strategy.
I've added some more graphics, and improved the monster pathfinding performance. Now there are 50 confused imps on the starting map, moving randomly. Combat has been expanded a bit, physical damage is now actually calculated, and there are very simple effects indicating if you hit an imp. No death animation though, so the imps just vanish upon the final hit. The imps have 20 hitpoints and don't fight back at the moment.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/jewelhunt/files/r008/
First quest: Clean the level from the 50 imps :D
Well, not really, but at least there is something to do now.
Friday and Saturday morning all uploads bigger than a few KB failed for me. Saturday evening it seemed to be alright again.
I've published a new release, since a lot of changes had been accumulating up. Many of them are just added artwork, but there are a few functional changes too.
- On my laptop it didn't reach 60 FPS. I have tried to optimize the display code, so it's back at 60 FPS again, even on the laptop, but I want to investigate this further because auch a simple map display should not need so much computation power.
- The basics of combat are implemented. Actually you don't see much of that in the demo, just if you hit the imp, it vanishes. But code structures are prepared to handle damage and defense calculations, so the only thing left to do there is to decide how to do those calculations (blocking, armor effects, elemental vs. physcial damage ...)
- The basics of player and monster speed handling are there now. Movement speed is prepared to no longer depend on the framerate but on passed time, but it needs more work. The imp is slower than the PC now, so one can actually chase and hit it.
- A few fixes went into the item prefix and postfix code. "Vorpal Sandals" with 58% enhanced damage looked too odd. (Sandals could get any magic enhancement).
- The map movement grid became finer. As a side effect I had to redo the village map, so that looks a bit different now than before. I hope I can stick with the chosen grid now.
Download:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/jewelhunt/files/r006/
I'm not sure what I'l do next, but I assume I will enhance the dungeon populating code, both with monsters and furniture, implement some real combat system, and also merchants for the village map and an item trading system. I also want to give the monsters some AI, to make them "live" in the dungeon, that is seek places to rest and sleep, wells to drink from, look for food or equipment (if intelligent).
I've got one more planet to convert, an earth type planet. I'll make a sheet with all the planet types and upload that. Might take a day or two, weekends I'm usually busy with real life duties.
It's mostly there to give some sense to acid based attacks. All the other elemental attacks just hurt the PC, and acid togetrhe with item durability will add a different sort of challenge. I think the tricky point is to balance it right - have enough of it, to make it interesting, but not so much that it becomes an annoyance.
I've implemented the effect so that above 50% of durability, the item will work fully, and below 50% durability the damage or defense will lower proportionally. Items won't break totally at the moment, but become useless (0 damage or 0 defense).
Also I want to say thanks to the people who made the flare armor set public domain. That's great artwork! I'm currently adapting and importing the images, some are already in, as the screenshot shows.
That's right. I'm not even sure how to do that ... but this might work:
1) Get the lastest release, because it includes the LWJGL and rlgamekit libraries which you need to compile the sources.
2) Compile everything from the src folder into a new JewelHunt.jar - this will require to set up the paths to the LWJGL and rlgamekit libraries in your IDE
3) Replace the JewelHunt.jar from the release with your own version.
I think that should work.
@ceninan: D2 had an "industructible" item mod, that becomes much more interesting if items have a finite life. An idea that I might pursue is that each repair attempt lowers the max durability of an item, so there is fixed limit of repairs. This way items will last quite long, but not forever.
Psychologically I'm slightly opposed to this idea, I like to keep things forever :D
Nethack and some more roguelikes also come with a very limited supply of items, so the player must carefully choose what to use. It seems to work, and some people like this sort of challenge.
@Malifer: I think I'll have to keep things simple, but I agree with the ideas there, that's quite close to my own ideas. The crafting idea is nice, did not think fo that yet :)
Wow, this is very generous to release such quality work as public domain!
I plan on using them in my jewelhunt game, thanks a lot for the great work!
Hi, I'm planning to use the empty scroll for my Jewelhunt project, I like the scroll design a lot. Good work!
Is this ok for attribution (will be part of the credits.txt file)?
Scrolls base image (CC-By 3.0, LGPL 2.1, LGPL 3.0)
http://opengameart.org/content/elemental-scrolls
A long while I was pondering about item durability, and how to make it interesting in the game. Also, I wanted to have enemies with attacks that damage some items, e.g. if you hit an acidic enemy with a metal sword, the sword will take some damage. Which would be totally uninteresting if such damage had no effect.
The current plan is to lower item efficiency if the durability drops below 50%. That is, the item will work fine above 50% durability, and below the efficiency will drop, weapons will do less damage and armor or shields will be less protective.
This also will put some emphasis on repairs, repair skills or NPCs who can repair items.
I hope it won't become a chore for the player to keep equipment in shape, but rather adds to strategy.
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