Weekly GameDev update: Interactables and Inventory.

This week was simply amazingly busy. My out of state sister did an impromptu visit and brought the brood. So it was visits to zoos and the White Water Center for a day of paddle boarding. We’re short staffed at the day job so I couldn’t take days off. But I still got stuff done with Immortal Realm! Sorry, no video this week.

All I can say is adding all these 3rd party features and packages is “not cheating”. I programmed and designed “Super Panda Adventure Tour” in 5 months and spent another 6 patching and updating it to make the game even more awesome. Doing it that way I understood every feature, option and line of code. Fixes were easy, even 6 months later. With Playmaker, Opsive’s Third Person Controller, behavior Designer and Inventory Manager pro, things are different. Now it’s learning each package while at the same time making sure each one plays nice with the others.

Inventory Manager

I’ve gotten to a nice place working these systems together now. Inventory Pro goes waaaaaaaaay beyond a simple Inventory manager. It coveres pretty much everything I need to make an RPG game. Items, Item types, skills, bonuses, currency and a ton of other features I haven’t even gotten to yet. It handles looting and pop up detail windows. From the looks of it, I can even incorporate skill leveling like Smithing, Tayloring and others. This is exactly what I want in Immortal Realm. It’s an RPG and becoming quite a world. When it comes to skill leveling, I want a system of Use it or Lose it.

So far I’ve only incorporated basic items and getting the GUI working. Once I link the health and skill system with Opsive’s controller and behavior designer the game will be going to great places. Disabling the mouselook when entering inventory will be a big step. But, hey, baby steps.

Playmaker and Interactables

Interacting with the world is a huge thing in all RPG games. You want to be in the world, not just an observer. But there is also the dark side of the world: Traps. Oh yes, the first Interactable traps are now in place and with this template, it’s going to be easier now to implement. Honestly, I’m super exacted to show these off and disappointed in my time constraints to not be able to produce a video this week.

Since I moved to an over the shoulder, first person style control, world interactions got difficult. No more raycasting from the mouse, we now need a HUD and center marker to illustrate where the player is looking. So now we’re more akin to Fallout or Skyrim in control schemes.

I got past that hurdle on Saturday. The ray is now cast from the center of the camera into the world. It looks for a very specific interactable layer and then the Click Manager does the job of sending the event to the object. I leave each object to decide how you interact with it. This completely simplified game design. You click a door, window, potato, it doesn’t matter. The Click Manager just sends off the task of interacting to the item and the rest is happy magic. Playmaker made this concept very easy to implement once I figured out the mechanics of it.

On the theme of a ClickManager, traps have been born. Walk over a clickplate, push a button and bad things can and will happen to the character. This is not a friendly world, and the wrong move will kil you. Thanks to Playmaker’s event style system, I can trigger a trap, play a sound and time things perfectly for the player, all with clicks.

Skill System

The Skill System really does fall under Inventory Manager Pro. but I’m so excited for this feature it got it’s own sub heading.

What I didn’t know, was inventory manager is quite literally it’s own game framework. While not as complete as RPGAIO and Ork Framework, it does a lot of things those do. Crafting, Merchants, loot, item pickup and skills. The downright raw basics an RPG game needs. It also grants enough flexibility to incorporate your own AI, Enviro and other features the other two frameworks don’t. Note: Ork does integrate with Third Person Controller and Emerald AI, but it got in the way of features I wanted. Without using RPGAI or Ork, I can also implement Immortal Realm’s unique death system that is integral to the core game.

What does all this mean? The game I’ve envisioned for years is that much closer to being possible. With the ability to introduce crafting skills and a multitude of other custom skills this is going to be great. Harking back to the days of Ultima.

You kill an animal and skin it. Your skill in skinning determines the yield. Your skill in leather craft determine quality and types of leather possible. Armor craft and tailoring skills determine the leather’s value in a jerkin. The economy will determine sale prices.

Each weapon type can also have it’s own skill set and well I’m getting ahead of myself. We’ll see where the game is next month.

Next week

Hey, it is next week and August is only a couple weeks away. July saw massive changes in the game. From it’s humble Ben Tristem and “Udemy” inspired roots to a completely different monster. That 41 hour course ended up being a 3 month thing and well worth it.

Well, there won’t be as many changes as I’m going to work on what I have now and make it great. But there will be a video to showcase all the work going into making Immortal Realm. I’m getting more and more excited for this game because all the systems are starting to work together and things are moving forward. Progress was slow, but moving fast now.

Going to nail down the basics of the inventory system in preparation for August goals. The controll system also needs another pass as it’s the major component that ties everything together.

Next Month

I plan on incorporating Emerald AI with the Behavior designer and Third person controller. The Quest system and “Love/Hate” will also be incorporated. I’ve noticed they all play “nice” together so we’ll see how this all plays out. Factions will be a big part of Immortal Realm. As most denizens have had a thousand years or more of bitterness between each other. This portion will most likely be the second biggest challenge in the game design and will take most of the year to achieve.

I’ll also leverage the skills gained in making Immortal Realm to start spinning the wheels on Super Panda 2. This won’t take too much time away from Immortal realm as both games will share very similar feature sets. This will help raise revenue to further develop Immortal Realm.

Thank you.