Mystery project – Post #2

The project is coming along nicely and I’m ironing out how I will implement some features as I go along.

I have two major problem areas where I’m not sure how I should proceed.

The first one being character animations. This one I do have a plan for now after speaking and discussing my problem with a fellow student, Georgios Chatzoglakis.

To describe this first problem I will explain my inventory and equipment system briefly. A character in the game may have vanity items equipped that change the appearence of their character. Each item is separate, so a character can be customized in many different ways to let the players express themselves in how their character looks. My problem was that I might need so much animation for every item. Not only do some items need an animation for running, there are some events in which I want the character to be able to do other things, like performing a kick. This would result in a LARGE ammount of time needing to be put into each new item.

The following was Georgios idea. Instead of drawing animations for each item, I could move and rotate the sprites in the game and getting them to “animate” in that way. This will be a challenge since I want the running animation to look realistic and making that happen by rotating and moving sprites will probably be hard for me.

The second problem I have is my business model. Not the model in itself actually, which is Free-To-Play with microtransactions, it’s how the players will pay with real money and linking the purchase to a player account. I want the players to be able to buy items from inside the game and I probably need to link ingame accounts to a database and connect them to a payment system. All this is a grey zone for me and my knowledge of how to link these things together. I need to do some research on this.

I have created most of the core features of the game. I need to polish some of the features and make the game more presentable, that is the next step of development.

I have imlemented Box2d and it’s fully functional and I have playtested the game with friends. The core mechanic seems to hold up but it needs some balancing as it stands now. I am about to implement another system to add depth and a reason for microtransactions to happen which will affect the balance of the entire game. I will create this completely before attempting to balance any further.

I’m aware that I am pretty cryptic in describing the game. The reason for this is that I need to define how to present the game and I actually want it to be a bit secret (;D), until I have something to present at least.

Until next update, stay awesome folks 😉