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Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Dungeon Colony Version 0.1.8.224

Today's version introduces new craft-able items and makes a few improvements to the engine. Download the free open alpha version 0.1.8.224 now.

New Wood Collection

Wood is an important resource in Dungeon Colony. Many objects are made of wood, wood can be used as fuel for fires and light up rooms with torches. This version adds new wood objects that you can craft:

First, there's a new coal image that replaces the old placeholder I had created:

old:                  new:

Using wood planks you can now craft a stool for decoration:


 Also from wood planks you can now craft a new crate to store all types of items:
  
There are 3 existing types of stock piles to store rocks, stone bricks and dirt that your minions collect. This new addition adds a stockpile to store wood. Like the other stockpiles, the wood pile visually reflects how much wood is currently stored inside. The following screenshot shows the new wood stockpile with the left-vertical one being nearly empty and the one on top is completely full: 


New Minion Work Animations 

Until now, minions were using the same animation for fighting, building, lumbering, mining, etc. So this update brings unique animations to the different jobs minions perform:

Lumbering:
Mining:

 Building:


Summary of Improvements
  • Adds new art for the coal resource.
  • Adds new object Crate. This can store anything and has no restrictions.
  • Adds new minion- mine, lumber, build and dig animations.
  • Adds stool furniture.
  • Adds new wood stockpile which can store wood logs and planks. I also adjusted logic for storing wood so that minions choose the stockpile over other containers if one is available.
  • Fixes bug that causes index out of bounds exception when trying to place torches on walls.
  • Re-adjusts the target location for lumbering trees


Friday, September 13, 2013

Dungeon Colony Version 0.1.8.218


Today's version (v0.1.8.218) is another push towards a more stable game engine. The fixes that are listed below are for the most part logical bug fixes, resolving issues that didn't break the game, but which were wrong or not working.

I have some exciting new game objects and art work that will be added in the coming weeks. Some of which will lay the foundation for the next game feature.

I also began with the development of a game editor. I'm still sketching it out but instead of making it a separate tool outside or parallel to the game, I decided to build it right into the game. I think this will save me a lot of work and it could make level making more interactive. The game editor will be used to create the main quests for Dungeon Colony, but I am also playing with the idea to make the editor available to players. T


Improvements & Bug Fixes:
  • Adds messages to alert the player when certain actions aren't possible and prints a reason next to the affected object.
  • Fixes null pointer exception on Path-Searching.
  • Fixes bug with occasional incorrect shadows at dungeon entrance when generating maps.
  • Fixes a bug with Pathfinding in specific areas of the map. (Dungeon Entrance Special Cases)
  • Fixes a bug that caused dead bodies to become collision objects after loading a game. Fixed it by adding a necessary properties to the save functionality.
  • Fixes bug that didn't increase movement speed when upgrading that skill.
  • Fixes issue that caused minions to forget their orders in situations when they spott an enemy unit.
  • Fixes issue when a creature is stuck when standing on top of an object that causes a collision and due to the collision the creature couldn't walk or take commands to walk off the object.
  • Fixes Bug that allowed certain containers to accept resources that they shouldn't.
  • Fixes bug that made enemies clairvoyant by finding out where your creatures were, even if the enemy couldn't see them.
 Please like Dungeon Colony on Facebook and support game development and name your own price to secure a copy of the game.

Thank you =)

AND HAPPY FRIDAY13th!!!

Saturday, September 7, 2013

Dungeon Colony Version 0.1.8.209

The food chain in Dungeon Colony hasn't been feeding your minions well enough in the past. To provide more nutrition, I updated the boars logic, allowing boars to reproduce. You may have noticed that boars eat the grass in the outside world. Grass boars eat now helps them prepare for offspring and fill up their tummy before bringing a new specimen into the world. How much each boar must eat is dependent on the entire population of boars. That is the somewhat unnatural way of limiting their numbers. Therefore, if too many boars occupy an area, they will eat up the grass and slow down their reproduction process 'naturally'. 
If you leave an adult boar to feed on grass for a long period of time, then the meat yielded will be larger than if you hunt for younger animals. Boars also are smaller, slower and weaker when born.

Don't move and stay quiet,... you may be able to spot a Mommy boar with her suckling:


Here is the summary of changes to the boars (v0.1.8.209):
  • Game starts of with set number of boars, if the number of boars on the map drops below this amount, new boars will be added to reach the threshold again (given some timer).
  • Boars can now reproduce on their own. Boars have a foodCounter that fills up each time they eat grass. When full, the boar is ready for offspring. This produces a new boar and resets the counter to 0. The limit of grass to eat is increasing exponentially with the number of boars on the map. Additionally, a natural limit to their growth is equal the amount of grass available. If a large herd eats up all the grass, the food counter will fill up slower and produce less offspring.
  • Select a boar to find out how much more food it needs to eat until the next offspring arrives.
  • The new boar offspring counter for each boar is also stored when saving the game.
  • As boars grow, more meat is beomces available after killing the animal. Baby boars start with one meat. As a boar grows into adulthood, the fur resource is also added.
  • Growth rate to adulthood is constant per growth level. There are 4 levels to adult hood each requiring to eat 100 grass to reach the next level. Reaching each level increases meat output by one. Each level also increases how much food the boar can eat, how fast it can walk, and, as an adult, it also becomes stronger.
  • After adulthood, growing still occurs and more meat is added to the boar, up to a given threshold.


Other changes and fixes in this version:

  • Leg Traps can now be re-placed and moved to another location, or put back into storage if desired.
  • Fixes issue with collecting water and the activity of selecting a water tile to command a minion to collect water.
I have a new list of bugs that I will focus on next. But last night, I started working on a bigger new feature that will be the first steps into making the actual main quest of the game.

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Prototyping on Paper

Here's a snapshot of my latest doodles which involve one of my many side projects on the game. Can you tell what it is about? Hehe, I don't want to reveal everything I do, but some obvious ideas ? ... My sister convinced me to post more of my notes (I'm no good at drawing) and I'm thinking to release a few periodically, if that's something you'd be interested in?

I use these a lot to visualize things on paper first and to discuss with the others. That one, for example, I sent to my artist. Drawing ideas on paper, rather than prototyping them, often gives me more time to delve deeply into the design elements.


Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Dungeon Colony Version 0.1.8.203

I've reached version (v0.1.8.203). 0.1.8.x is growing mighty large and, in fact, it should already have moved on to version 0.1.9.x. However, since the major change in 0.1.8.x was fundamentally changing core game engine modules I decided to focus on fixing as many bugs affected by the tile size changes as possible. Once I feel like the engine is stable, I will begin development of the next larger feature and move to 0.1.9.x.

Therefore, today's update fixes issues that stem from the core engine changes and addresses many issues caused by doors in the game. There are three types of doors: Wooden, Steel Reinforced Fortified, and Iron Doors:

The first thing I changed was the life points of each door. The previous values were too low to prevent enemies from breaking through. The new values are 150 LP for the wooden door, 250LP for the fortified door and 1000LP for the Iron door. Especially the iron door can keep enemies at bay given it's iron properties.

Before this version, doors had several issues which have been addressed as follows:

Door improvements:
  • Balances Door health points, increasing each door's health to 150 for the wooden door, 250 for the steal reenforced door, and 1000 for the prison door.
  • Fixes preview of rotated door within a container cell.
  • Fixes rotating doors. Now doors can only rotate 180 degrees once placed. In the container the rotation steps are still 90 degrees per step.
  • Fixes placement of doors:
    • aligns doors to tile grid when previewing door placement.
    • will only allow doors to be placed
      • a): if no entity is directly colliding with the door.
      • b): if a wall immediate too the door's hinges (on both sides) is present.
      • c): when doors have room to open in either direction.
  • Fixes issue with enemies who get stuck when they face a closed door instead of trying to break them.
And a bug fix unrelated to doors:
- Fixes bug that caused a pickup behavior from not being deleted from the stack.

I am not happy with the doors in general yet. The look isn't 100% there yet, so I will most likely have them redone. Additionally, I also want the opening/closing animation to be a bit nicer. Plus they don't break the shadows, which is something of lower importance though.

But for now, that's it for doors and I will move on to boars to address issues mentioned by many alpha testers. There seems to be not enough of them.

Monday, September 2, 2013

Dungeon Colony Version 0.1.8.198

This update brings Dungeon Colony to version v0.1.8.198 and fixes a range of bugs. Additionally, a new indicator shows the player when a container is full.

Take advantage of Name your Own Price to pre-purchase Dungeon Colony and help with development costs. Name your own price will soon go on break, so if you like this game and would like to see it completed, this is the best time to show your support. Thank you! =)

Summary of Improvements:
  • Adds blinking indicator in inventory frame when the container is full. This applies to any type of container, also the bag each Minions carries.
Bugs:
  • Fixes bug when clicking the rotate button that allowed objects like the workbench or dining table to rotate into walkable objects on the map. While that seems valid, it prevents certain game play.
  • Fixes bug that prevented player from placing walls even though the target location was eligible for wall placing.
  • Fixes bug that prevented creatures from storing small objects laying on the ground into containers that have a size smaller than a game tile.
  • Fixes bug that caused minions to ignore stockpiles when collecting certain resource types from walls.
  • Fixes issue with objects when attacked the target property never gets cleared when the attacker is gone.