Exploration Prototype 1.1

Since I have some time on my hands at the moment I’ve been working pretty hard on Vita Essentia. The prototype is coming along very nicely, and I have some basic systems in place as I gradually learn how scripting works and all that jazz. We now have a sexy blue UI that is capable of quitting to the front end and to desktop! We can also change character’s equipment and use items. The inventory has been by far the most difficult challenge, and it isn’t even fully complete yet. Obviously players need to be able to pick up items in the world, and have these added to the inventory, which they can then use from said inventory. None of those things were easy, especially as items had to be added to the list in the order they were found. Lots of arrays talking to each other in complicated ways.

I also had to create my own custom trigger class in order to allow anyone implementing levels for the game to place items for the player to pick up via the editor. That was some pretty serious work, but the upshot is that now anyone can open the editor, place an ‘ItemTrigger’ and then just type in the item ID, whether to add or subtract from the inventory, and the quantity to do so. I also figured out how to display console commands without the rest of the HUD so the player gets a nice little notification when stuff happens. This will only be a placeholder until I start work on UDK’s canvas system.

You may notice on this new video a couple of new areas. Thanks to Mike for putting those together, he is very busy though due to being so darn talented so we won’t be seeing more! But on the topic of level design I’ve been reconsidering my plan to use pre-rendered environments. Whilst I do have good design reasons to do so and it would mean we wouldn’t have any technical concerns whatsoever, the trouble is implementing object collision and the illusion of depth (for example the billboarding effect when the player walks ‘behind’ something) is extremely time consuming and fiddly. The more I use it the more I think we’ll be reverting to full 3D levels, which I would rather not do but on the plus side we’ll have more flexibility with the camera system.

I’ve got a few more things to implement over the next week or so, but come the beginning of November comes the beginning of the most important system yet to trial: the battle system. My aim is to get this prototype finished by the end of the year and at the moment we’re right on schedule, so I’m pretty pleased.

- Luke

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