We have finally released the third alpha, the first one since we started using Godot.
The bigger purpose of the new alpha release was to demonstrate, to the world and to us, that we can deliver. In many ways, Alpha 3 is a short game in itself, with a definite beginning, middle and end.
It has been a long time since my last post and I wanted to fill everyone in on the latest developments of Wizards of Unica.
As you may have read before, Wizards of Unica started as a 7 Day Rogue-Like in 2014. This year, to test how my skills developed, I participated in the yearly 7DRL Challenge. The result is Black Jack is still at large, a western roguelike based on a unique Blackjack inspired game mechanic for action resolution developed in little less than 24 hours.
As we move forward it is time to go into a deeper detail about the design of Wizards of Unica and finalize the various game mechanics. This is the first post of a serie of article that will accompany us for several months while Daniele and I refine and finalize the gameplay of our game, and the starting point are WoU’s Design Goals.
It will take still some time to release an updated executable, but finally the code is stable enough to be uploaded into a new repository. If you would like to take a peek, you can find the new sources, implementing the updated ECS architecture, over here on Github.
First spoken words!
The Turn Manager, maybe one of the most insidious systems, is essentially done. After a bit of refactoring it is actually quite compact (about 230 lines of code) but the thoughts and logic behind it not so much, so I thought it would be nice to write a bit about it as a learning experience.
A small update on the latest developments, building on the concepts of the separate time queues. The work on them is almost done, and now scripts can chain actions in a mostly seamless way, as shown by the sliding gargoyle in the picture.
Solo pong, a pastime for wizards
I am still working on release 0.3 and right now I am tinkering with a brand new problem: how to create and chain timed events inside a game turn.
As always, the problem is harder than it sounds.
The sample scenario
Way back I decided that scripting should be in the game. While developing the new architecture I finally came around and did exactly that. Finally, scripting is in the game!
It was… surprisingly simple. Continue reading
The transition to the new architecture is slowly but steadily happening. Somewhere in the next couple of months it should be finished and then a new rounds of functionalities and updates will hopefully come close by thanks to the improvements, right now the management of lava has improved significantly and it no longer slows down your movements.
Lava generation (shrunk because of file size)
As discussed previously, I am implementing an ECS architecture, this has changed quite dramatically the game architecture from this Continue reading
Wizards of Unica 