RAR III - Post V

Hi!

A new update post for RAR III is here. Wanted to write this one for a long time 😄

The last few months have been quite interesting in my personal life, as we’ve been setting up a second place to stay when we travel to Turkey to visit my wife’s family in Ankara. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it. I never saw my wife as happy as she was to be able to spend more time with her family 😊

During the last couple of months, apart from that, I also obtained an MPC One, a device with which I can produce music in a much fun and fast way. I hope I can upload some videos on YouTube one of these days to share what type of things I’ve been creating 😎

And, of course, I’ve been able to work on RAR III, and, according to my Trello, I’ve managed to do “64 cards”, which is not bad at all! 💪

RAR III News⌗

The main topics about what I’ve developed since the last post are the following:

• [Equipment] screen
• Known/Unknown equipment properties
• Added [Cursed]
• New NPC: [Priest]
• “New” NPC: [Villager]
• Basic [New Game] screen
• [Main Menu] screen
• [Game Over] screen
• [Islands] and [Tiles]
• Various

[Equipment] screen⌗

I finally coded the new Equipment Screen.

The UI is pretty similar to the one in RAR II, but I did it in a more dynamic way compared to the hardcoded one on RAR II. So, at some point, if I decide to revamp how it looks, it’s going to be easier than it was on RAR II.

I’m quite happy that I already implemented this, and it is fully functional. I may need to modify some of it at some point when I complete the definition of the items and equipment items, but so far this screen is quite solid!

Known/Unknown equipment properties⌗

After working on the Equipment Screen, I was toying around with the idea of not knowing the properties of the equipment items until you equip them, or identify them. There are many roguelikes out there that do this, and I didn’t explore that until now. I really like this mechanic, as it adds some mystery until you discover how much powerful an item is.

In the screenshot below it shows an inventory with various weapons, some of them without properties, as they haven’t been wielded or identified yet.

Cursed⌗

Ok, so, if you’ve seen it in the previous section, there’s also a new thing, that I believe some roguelikes have too: Cursed.

I really liked the idea of taking some risk when equipping an item. If the item is cursed and you equip it, you won’t be able to unequip it unless you find the way (for now, I’ve added a new NPC called Priest, described below, that allows to do that).

I will explore this more and try to come up with the proper balance between cursed and uncursed items, because right now I just added a 50% chance for an equipment item to be cursed… Also, when I work more on the items and their properties, I might like to add certain penalties to these cursed items (e.g. they may slow you down, or reduce your attack, poison you, teleport you around randomly… we’ll see if I am able to do such things!).

New NPC: Priest⌗

As stated above, I created a new NPC that didn’t exist in previous games: the Priest.

Random villages/towns/cities will have a Priest, who, as of now, will allow you to pay some gold in exchange of getting your currently equipped equipment uncursed. I’m planning on maybe adding some other functions to this NPC. In some games they also are useful to heal, revive, or even to add some blessing to you… I’ll think about these and see what fits into the game.

“New” NPC: Villager⌗

Nothing special to mention here, other than the fact that I just added a simple NPC which just opens a basic dialog like the one shown in the screenshot below. I’m just building the pieces to code further the conversation and quest logic in the future.

Basic [New Game] screen⌗

I added a really basic New Game screen. For now, it just asks for the name of the Hero. Again, just building the basic blocks of the game. Later on I plan to develop this further to be able to select things like the Race and starting class, etc.

[Main Menu] screen⌗

I worked a little bit on the Main Menu screen, but still didn’t complete it. It has a simple gradient background, and some buttons to access the different screens, but these screens are empty.

Will work on the rest of the Main Menu and these screens when the game is more completed in the future. For now I just wanted to start seeing how it would look like. Sometimes I just take some simple task to work on when I’m too tired to do something more complex. 😅

[Game Over] screen⌗

Although the Game Over screen is still a work in progress, I am quite happy with how it’s starting to look like.

Now, when the Hero dies, I store some data about it, and also the reason of death, so I can print both in a colorful way here.

The statistics in the bottom part are dynamic, in a sense that, only the ones that you have records of, will appear (e.g. islands explored, monsters killed, quests completed, etc.).

[Islands] and [Tiles]⌗

Finally, one of the biggest things I’ve been working on, and was a tough one… The [Islands]!

I’ve worked on defining a set of [Island] types and [Tile] types and some code to generate different tiles depending on the type of [Island].

It’s not final, but it is already coded and working quite fine!

In the next weeks I plan to work also on the generation of the content on the Tiles, depending on its type, the type of island, etc. It’s going to be also a tough one, and I will try my best to add as much variety and content as I can on RAR III.

Some screenshots of different island types (don’t pay too much attention to the things on top of the tiles like monsters or other things like the question marks, they are still provisional):

Various⌗

I still need to work a lot on base code of the game (e.g. the Items classes and logic, the Tile Contents, etc.) but the code is starting to look good, and it is allowing me to add certain features without wasting as much time as in the previous entries of the game.

Things worth mentioning are the following:

• I’ve added filtering on [Skills] and [Spells] screen to differentiate Combat vs the Journey ones.

• I started to work on the [Sound] code. Still didn’t add any special sounds, I’m just using the “select” sound for all the places where a sound needs to be played, but I’ve prepared the types and everything so I can just replace them in a single place once I add the real ones.

• I’ve worked on various minor improvements and refactors (this is always going to be present, as it’s a work in progress, I’m always realising that some things that I coded are no useful the way I did them, so I have to redo or modify them in order to move forward… this is the real curse 😬).

Afterword⌗

Thank you, if you’ve read until this line, that’s amazing, because I realize now that this was a loooong post! 😀

I hope you are getting as much excited as I am about this game. I know it’s still very early in the development, but every piece I build, every step I’m making, it’s making the game look more real… I can’t wait to complete it!!! 🚀

Take care, and stay safe…! ❤️

Archison (Luis)