So, got married, moved house, started an EPIC BIG GAME ™ (http://www.legendsoffore.com) and then realised I don’t have time at the moment to do it justice (of course I’ll be doing it). So I’m building a little game to test a bunch of stuff for the big game!

To the topic of the post, I’m building a game with levels, and monsters and all that good stuff, but a problem I always have is determining whats “hard enough” (fnarr). Balancing levels is always difficult especially when you’re appealing to wide range of players – if only there was a way to statistically define the difficulty of of a level?

For once, this time, I’ve designed my AI suitably generically – ok I didn’t mean to but I just spent a bit more time on it than before. The side effect is that the AI is smart enough to play for the monsters OR the players. So the first thing I did was make the game play itself. Brilliant to watch and found me a tonne of bugs straight away.

That was good, but then what – I mean I don’t want to take ages getting out the difficulty information and can’t really tell anything without a lot of runs.

Next step, make it run “headless” (for those who don’t know, that means without a display). Unfortunately a bunch of the data code I’m using from LibGDX actually depends on OpenGL (i.e. Tiled Map support). So – how to make LibGDX work in headless mode. First:

LwjglNativesLoader.load();
Gdx.files = new LwjglFiles();
Gdx.gl = new MockGL20();

Yes, I could have had the “headless backend” but its an awful lot to bring it for this.

So, now Gdx is initialised by whats MockGL20? I thought I’d have to bring in a Mocking library (like Mockito) but turns out all I needed to do was have Eclipse generate an empty shell implementing the GL20 interface. Boom! It’s done.

Now I can run a complete quest at top speed having it playing itself and evaluate the outcome. The output looks like this:

TEST RUN COMPLETED 'The Trial' (quest1.tmx)
QUESTS PLAYED: 100
QUESTS WON: 100 (100%)
QUESTS LOST: 0 (0%)
AVERAGE HERO SURVIVAL: 3 (of 4)

Excellent, I can now determine the first level is pretty easy – 100% wins from the player AI. Note thought that most of the time one of the heroes died – so not quite simple!

Hopefully this will help to balance out the levels and get their difficulty just right. Of course player feedback will help tune my understanding of the statistics coming out – assuming you guys play it!

So I guess it’s official, I’m starting to work on Legends of Yore 2 – which I’m subtitling Rise of the Darklings. I’ll post some concept shots etc in a minute but I’d like to talk about the process I’ve been taking during the interim for a minute.

As you’ve seen if you read my blog or follow on twitter I’ve been knocking out lots of little game demos, this is how I work. I try stuff, lots of stuff, over and over again until I feel comfortable I’ve got everything down. In this case the projects were:

Voxel Based Engine – Experimenting with different graphical styles

Carubloc – Looking at LibGDX across platforms

Matchnik – To look a procedural puzzle generation

Turn Based Platformer – To look at turn based mechanics with a bit more action

Mega Melon Adventure – To play with gamepads and the OUYA

Sub-pixel Sprite Animation – Obviously more tailored towards Legends, just needed to find a way to generate enough graphics.

There’s actually been a few others that never saw the light of day, including a very random bouncing game. This is I’ve come to understand my process. I experiment a lot before I actually go anywhere. It’s not intentional but I can see the pattern looking back. I’m hoping this is going to make Legends of Yore 2 a better game.

So, enough waffle, Legends of Yore 2 – so far I’m coding and spriting like crazy. Here’s the concept art that I’m currently working for. This time it’s all my own art – I intend to license some music/sounds but everything else should be from me:

The plan for the game is do something similar to last time while fixing as many of the things that I learnt along the way. So the game is intended to be epic in size and scope – hopefully bigger than last time. Things I liked last time:

• No level cap – keep going as long as you like
• Yore – the world, it’ll be set here again though maybe many years on
• Diversity – the varied landscape and characters
• Procedural – the dungeons kept changing but the world above was the same. People seemed to love that
• Items/Armor/Weapons – a huge wealth of things to collect and apply
• Class upgrades – this was a late add but once that I absolutely loved.
• The Second Stat – Wizards got Health and Mana as always, but why couldn’t Warriors and Archers have something special too – Rage and Zen were added. Very neat (thanks to PuppyGames for the original thought on this)

So there were a bunch of things that I did last time but I want to be better this time:

• Magic – last time it was too hap hazard, designing a spells tree with different schools of magic before we get started.
• Skills – as with magic, way to random. Again skill tree designed before hand this time.
• Pets – I always felt like they could have been so much more. I was losing steam with the game when I added them so they came out partially done. Fix them this time.
• Quests – I liked the quests system in Legends, it added a lot. This time I want quests to be richer and more varied.
• Save Games – they will be keyed against an email you provide. Last time it was just too half assed. This time it’s going to be cleanly done with a web portal to support your character.
• In App Purchase – none. ever again. Buy the full version. Your account gets updated. Fin.
• Interface – The interface last time was streamlined for mobile players. It was good. However, this time it’s going to be better and also support console players more naturally.

Finally bits that I want to add that I didn’t have last time:

• Richer graphics, visible weapons, variations in characters, animations and direction changes. Yes it won’t feel quite the same, but Yes it’s going to be better.
• Epic Quests – large quests that get you through the story line more obviously. Legends actually had a story line but I’m not sure anyone saw it
• Underwater – it’s got to be in there somewhere, I’m just not sure how yet. I want it though.
• Dynamic Events – I want the game to still be single player but I’m going to introduce a system that allows me to have “in game events” like a MMORPG. Zombies infest a town etc.
• Player Interaction – While the game will be single player but I want to introduce some innovative ways to have players interact.

So.. yep.. on the way. As always and especially with last game I appreciated all the player feedback and ideas I can get. I’ll be running graphics competitions and other things (oooer) as we go along.

Hope you come along for the ride!

Another game experiment starting with me wanting to try out turn based platformers. Could you write a game that was platform based but had the turn based nature of Legends of Yore. So I set to work:

The other thing that I wanted to try out was procedural generation for platformer levels – this turns out to be reasonable to implement once you represent everything as a graph. The significant difference between platform generation and dungeon generation is that links between nodes/rooms/platforms aren’t always bi-directional – i.e. you can fall from a platform to another but that doesn’t guarantee you can jump back up. I’ll probably write a blog entry about that later.

Anyway, heres the current state as a web based games (required WebGL), infinite exploration – not much gameplay at the moment:

Treasure – Turn Based Procedurally Generated Platformer