Far Afield

[Sirocco]

There are two mid-bosses on the map. You probably don't want to run into them unless you're well-prepared. Their locations are somewhat random, but there will be hints scattered about that will clue you in.

[Sirocco]

Back to work on this. I'm trying to keep solid progression on this project, so I can close it out and move on.

My current objective is to clean up some of the terrain that still has placeholder art. The old capitol of the island, Felmoria, was less agrarian and closer to industrial-age (or even later). It has a broader tile set compared to other terrain, with roughly three times the tile variety. There are ruined high-rises, streets, and other structures that hint at its original nature. The boss has reigned here for quite some time, obviously.

After I finish with that, I plan to put a little more love into the hills, and possibly the deserts as well. Overall the world is looking great, and it's fun to explore the randomly-generated islands to see what wonky stuff the program spat out. I've also worked up a few more sprites, but those will probably end up as friendly NPCs rather than enemies.

[Sirocco]

Finally getting some energy saved up to resume development of this project. There are a few annoying logical errors that I need to get out of the way. I hesitate to call them bugs, as it's not so much a problem with my code, but side-effects of what I though the code should do. I do still have a crash bug lurking in the code, and it's so rare that I keep forgetting to fire the game up in a debugger.

I'm also working, and I use that term loosely, on a little music. Just dipping my feet in the water, so to speak.

[Sirocco]

Fixed some annoyances in the movement model, redraw a few sprites, and did some serious tweaking with how projectiles are handled. Shields will now deflect projectiles, and this makes getting the shield upgrades a greater priority than before. I also whipped up a few more sound effects for projectiles and such.

Pretty good day, really

[Sirocco]

I'm working on revamping some of the earliest enemies I created. Starting with the sprites themselves, I'm then looking at the overall balance of enemy firepower, and what I expect players to have to deal with as they navigate the various environments in varying states of upgrade. A major objective was to make getting through the mountainous regions of the game a living hell, which is why there's equipment on sale at the guild to make the trips faster. But the other component is having dangerous enemies all around, and while yetis and golems are powerful, they are not fast. Harpies fill in the gap by being fast, and now they can throw a barrage of sharp quills at you from a distance, before closing in.

You'll still need a good sword and armor to stay alive, but your shield upgrades finally shine here. A fully upgraded shield has a flat 75% chance of turning any projectile, and you'll need that to fend off the swarms of harpies. They're fast, numerous, and now capable of keeping you on the run while the heavies close in.

Projectiles are becoming more important, with nixies, archers, harpies, golems, and sorcerers having ranged attacks -- but physical combat is still the star of the show.

[Sirocco]

Spent some time adding better variation to existing tile sets. Still need to work on the mountains, tho.

[Sirocco]

I've been doing a ton of playtesting, and loving the experience in general. That said, the game does require some tweaking, and I've got a few ideas (with some help from 0xDB and Sonrisu).

I'm going to offer two new items at the guild, and they will be cheap enough that you'll want to pick them up as soon as you start the game. Or you can always tough it out and spend your hard-earned cash on the less optional items. The first is a lure, that can be used any time to attempt to summon a goatie (which you can then kill and eat). Unfortunately, this game's anything but fair, and I'm a douche bag, so there's a good chance all it'll do is summon a powerful mob to harass you. This is something you should use as a last resort, when you're starving and can't find any food.

Early on in the game it's worth it to take the risk. After you've picked up a few flash upgrades you'll be swimming in food and water, so it's not worth the risk of running into a hunting party.

The other item is a dowsing rod, which will put a marker on the horizon if you're close to a spring that you've already discovered. This is more a matter of convenience than anything else. It keeps you from hopping in and out of the map looking for nearby springs. And really.... springs have a huge blue 'stain' on the map that spreads out for quite a distance, so it's pretty easy to just casually happen upon them.

Any way, that's the current idea. I'll probably implement them this weekend, and if they turn out to be too OP in the end I'll just make them more expensive, or nerf them somehow.

[Sirocco]

I'm almost done with the game. Imagine that! Me, finishing an involved game project in under a decade.

Clearly I can't let that happen.

I'm not gonna knock anyone using SDL2. I don't care for it at all, but whatever makes you productive, is okay in my book. I found myself fighting the lib so much that I was never really comfortable with it. Everything was a chore. Basically, my brain wasn't wired up for it. I've been using Raylib for the last 1.5 years, and so far I love it. Again, no knocks, just choices.

I've started porting the Far Afield code base from SDL2 to Raylib 4.0. It will take a bit, but the code base will slim down due to Raylib's streamlined nature, which gives you simple commands for normal use cases, and more complex commands for special cases. I can also ditch a lot of crufty code along the way. I'm comfy with Raylib and want to get all my projects out of the SDL2-space.

The other major change, besides moving to a different lib, is going full native and ditching the low-res software rasterizer for hardware-supported 3D. The former was a bucket list item, which I'm thrilled with, and can safely cross off the list. Now I'll get cleaner draws out to the horizon, smoother rotations, and I won't have to carefully position my camera to get good looking screenshots. The software routines looked fantastic in motion, but looked borderline awful in still shots, mostly at a distance.

So here we go. Also, I got bored and wrote a bare-bones CRT shader. Raylib WIP on the left, original code on the right.

[Sirocco]

I'm enjoying a well-deserved vacation ATM, so I'm not really working on this, or anything else for that matter

I did get to a good stopping point last week, having built a simple tiling routine to drop textures on quads that are near the player. This seemed to work rather well, but there's some stuttering that occasionally crops up. Given that my GPU and CPU are sitting at less than 5% utilization, I'm guessing it's something in the lib. I'll have to dig into that a little later.

For now, I'm recharging my batteries. Aw yiss.

[carra]

Well given how busy you have been I'd say you have earned your vacation. So be sure to rest well and work on your games only if you feel like it