While I didn’t have quite as much time to work on my thesis over Winter break, I still feel on track, and am excited to share updates on my project, especially going forward.
My early prototype leaving last semester was lacking in a few ways. One of the main problems with it is that while I had most of the games most fundamental mechanics implemented, I didn’t really have an environment to test them in for fun or balance purposes. The player could run around, cast spells, and I had systems in place for creating and implementing new items with some ease, there still wasn’t really any gameplay. For one, this made the project much more difficult to showcase, since there wasn’t much to look at, but more importantly, it was really hard to actually find the fun in my design. Being a game centered on combat, it needed something to fight, so the main push of my winter break was spent on AI.
This was pretty daunting, but I had a good idea of how simple game AI works, and all-in-all it went pretty smoothly. Wicker’s AI enemies are driven by finite state machines. This isn’t the most modern solution (as much as I understand, at least), but it’s well suited to the really simple AI I’m concerned with building, and it’s also really fast to get up and running. I’m using Unity’s built in NavMesh system, which is more than good enough for what I need. After a few weeks I had a simple little Bat enemy up and running. They’re very simple and kind of unthreatening, but it’s more dynamic than shooting at a wall, and as a proof of concept, they get the job done. More recently, I added a Wraith enemy that follows the player at a distance and fires projectiles.
Moving on from AI, I had one other major area to cover. While I had my magic system working since around October, Wicker still lacked melee combat. The game is designed around a flow between melee and ranged magic combat, so melee is really one of the pillars of the project. I regret putting it off for so long, because getting melee working in the framework I had built took a frustrating amount of refactoring, but I got it working. I also have a system in place for tying secondary abilities to weapons (like extra attacks and movement options), which opens up a lot of design possibilities later down the line.
I’ve done a lot of less flashy behind the scenes work too. I’ve been adding new items when I get the urge (currently the game has 5 magic weapons, 3 spells, and 3 melee weapons), with more to come. I’ve also set up an event system for the game, which isn’t doing much yet, but will make it much easier for me to implement items with unique effects in the future.
I have a lot of plans for the game going forward, but in the near future, I want to finally open up to playtesting. This has been my goal for months, but I think the game is almost ready for this. The biggest hurdle will just be getting a functional gameplay loop in place, so that testers have something to actually play through – it shouldn’t be hard to get something up and running though. I would consider this the jump from Prototype to Alpha. Keep your eyes peeled if you’re interested, I want to get this playtest out by the end of February – I’ll be posting about it more on here and in the discord in the future.