RAR III - Post IV

Hi!

This is the first RAR III post of the year! 😇

Took longer than expected to write this, and I apologize for it, but, you know, between Christmas, some travelling to visit my wife’s family in Turkey and some other personal stuff (and my main job, which some of you already know, sucks almost all my time and energy 😅), I couldn’t find quality time to write this. But here I am, finally! 💪

In between all the things I’ve been busy with during the last month, I’ve been able to work quite a lot on RAR III, and I will try to share in this post the main big things.

In the last month, I did a lot of effort on the definition of the next things to work on, and I came to the conclusion that I wanted to focus on implementing the different screens of the game before digging deeper on the engine of the game.

RAR III News⌗

These are the main pieces of work I’ve been doing (a part from more definition of the game, story, etc. that I won’t share today 😜):

• Added [Bounties]
• Improved [Inventory] screen
• Added [Backpack] and [Weapon] items
• Various
  • [Shop]
  • [World] screen
  • Share Hero stats
  • [Journey] screen

Bounties⌗

For RAR III I thought, instead of having only [Quests] like on RAR II, it occurred to me to separate the [Quests] about killing certain monsters and add them as [Bounties].

I’ve made these be given at a new type of [Tile Content] called [Bounty Board]. You can [Read] the [Bounty Board] and get its [Bounties].

For now, I just added a simple type of [Bounty] which consists on killing a [Monster] (sounds familiar?). But I plan on adding some more types of [Bounty] (e.g. you will have to follow the [Monster]’s tracks until finding it, and, of course, killing it 😅).

In the [Bounties] screen, the current [Bounties] are listed. I also added a limit to the amount of active [Bounties] you can have. Of course there will be some way to increase this limit (e.g. some passive [Skill]). More about this in the future!

Inventory⌗

After playing a lot to RAR II in the last few months, to get some inspiration and ideas for improvements, I realised, once you start having a lot of items, it can be tough to find a certain item in the [Inventory], and you have to scroll a lot. So, taking the idea from the [Crafting] screen on RAR II, I added filtering to the [Inventory]. Right now, I’m filtering by all the item types, which are not final. But the code is ready, so, when I have a more solid code regarding items, the filtering will be possible almost automatically.

This is how it looks right now:

Items⌗

Added [Backpack] and [Weapon] items, to start creating the necessary code to have different types of items you can [Equip].

• [Backpack]: as you can guess, it’s an [Item] you can [Equip] to increase your [Inventory] size.
• [Weapon]: a simple item which allowed me to start creating the base code to have equippable items that contains and affects to certain stats/attributes.

I am not digging into the whole [Equipment] items implementation yet, but these few additions and the changes I needed to do in order to have such type of items, allowed me to prepare the code a little bit better for it.

Various⌗

Amongst all the coding and additions to the project, the things I’d like to highlight are the following:

• I worked on the [Shop] screen, in order to allow the player to buy and sell items. Added filtering to this screen too (a part from the usual sorting feature).

• The [World] screen is now displaying the current Island name and type on top of it. I plan to add the rest of Islands in a similar way than RAR II, but I’m postponing the development of it until I work on the [Persistance], which won’t be something I will tackle until I have most of the game, screens and engine ready.

• I brought the [Share] Hero stats feature from RAR II (both text and image). It was not difficult to reuse some of the code, so I’m glad I didn’t have to build this from scratch. I believe this is one needed feature so people can easily share with a couple of “clicks” their [Hero] “card”.

• I improved the output text in the [Journey] screen. I’ve limited the width it can take, and I like it better now.

Combat in action⌗

I didn’t share this yet in a post, but I’ve also worked on making the combat a little bit more fun by adding some small animations to the [Hero] and [Monster] sprites. You can see it in this short gif:

Afterword⌗

Okay, so, this is it for today’s post. I hope you like what you are reading and seeing here, and that you give your feedback in any of the usual ways (Reddit and/or Discord).

I’m having a blast coding this game, and, I can feel all these years coding RAR I and RAR II and also the experience on my main jobs as an Android Engineer are allowing me to code it faster and better. So, even if I’m not working full time on this game, whenever I spend some hours on it, I feel like I’m doing a lot of progress…

… but at the same time, I realise there’s still a loooot of work to do. So, I ask you all to be a little bit patient, as I can’t even give any date on when I estimate the game to be ready yet. I will continue working on it, as much as I can and see where it leads. And when I feel it’s already playable, I’ll share some sort of early alpha version with some of you 🙃

Without further a do, I wish you all the best, health and a great start of the week tomorrow!

Archison (Luis)