Aerie of Ruin

Thursday, May 29, 2008

950716 steps to go...

Saw this when doing some maintenance. The blue really draws the eye!

Blogger is being difficult....click on the image to bask in the glory of MS.

Monday, May 26, 2008

!(a blog)

All 12 heroes are now in the game, and artifact implementation has begun. Some of the powers have been altered and made more interesting. I'll post a change list soon.

Thursday, May 15, 2008

...but don't worry I'm not going anywhere. Lots of real life happening, but now that is safely taken care of for a while, it's back to mapping!

The AI is in a better state now, with only three outstanding behaviors left to add: melee hero temperence, gate defense, and gate upgrading. Even without those it is quite fun (for me) to start up a 4v4 game played with AIs and see who comes out on top.

I've fixed many small issues and have now completed 8/12 heroes and started on #9: the Broodmother. After her I'll tackle to Duchess of Drake, and finally crown it all with the General and the Black King. Once those are in I'll turn my attention to the artifact creation and work on adding a few final layers of strategery before final AI work, tuning, balance, and map beautification.

It's been almost exactly a month since I've started this project, and when it moves, wow does it move fast. What a testament to Blizzard's incredible tool and asset work that such a major departure from W3 can be created, with no prior knowledge of the toolset, in such a short period of time. Also it is worth noting that I decided a few weeks ago to expand the scope of the project rather than diminish the quality and vision of the final product. It wouldn't do to show that I had picked up bad habits and felt the need to rush this to release!

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

It's Alive, Aliiiiiiive!

I stared into the Abyss of AI and found it staring back! Once they released me from the asylum, I discovered that the AI editor isn't used for custom maps at all. An AI system for this map would need to be totally trigger driven (!!!) which means lots of work.

During my research I also came to realize how important it would be to have some "automated testers" and also how important AI is for a finished product. I decided that it would expand the scope of the map significantly but it would be worth it. I was really happy to learn that heroes will use custom skills fairly well on their own, which removed a big chunk of control logic from the scope.

The AI has a sort of hierarchy of needs that goes like this:

Stay Alive
Defend Gates
Navigate
Spend money
Level-up

I'd estimate the progress in each of those areas to be:

Stay Alive - 80% - needs melee hero adjustment
Defend Gates - 0%
Navigate - 80% - 1 bug where heroes lose move orders
Spend money - 60% - works for the black kingdom, only a little for free peoples
Level-up -100%

Melee heroes (1) have a hard time staying alive since they are so aggressive. I'll put in some logic to have them stand back and soak free XP at lower levels. Defending gates (2) should be straight forward. There is one navigation bug (3) left where custom trigger skills are overriding move orders. Spending money (4) works for the demon gate upgrade system and potions. The Free People money system is next on my list to put in. I had to think long and hard about the leveling system (5), but it is now working for each hero. Both spending and leveling will require updates as new items and heroes are implemented, but it doesn't take much and the rest of the AI should stay autonomous (ha).

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Today I Finished Blackened on Expert Guitar!

Wooo! I guess the title says it all ^^
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Afterwards I got to work on teh craft and implemented the following:

Fall back lane spawning
Add gate and outpost rebuilding spots
Add gate scoring
Basic item store

The fall back spawning system works by checking the side lanes for friendly spawners, and if it doesn't find any it doubles up the spawning from the main base/castle. This effectively stalls the snowball effect, and in practice works out really really well. The gate and outpost rebuilding adds a neat movement to the game that wasn't there before, and also more strategic spending options. Gate score replaced lumber and basic gold items are now in shops near the hero spawn areas.

Tomorrow I'll look into adding versus AI. If it works that should go a long way to helping me get plenty of data with which to balance out the gold economy. What remains then, gameplay wise, are the other heroes and artifacts, gate point economy, and a good hard look at creep upgrades.

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Checking Off Lists with Gusto

Some of the changes implemented last time deserve some elaboration. Removing the phase system, the hopetown invasion, and complex creep routing, makes the map a bit more traditional, but what is in place now should still fresh and unique and more importantly understandable and predictable. Asymmetry will be preserved in several other ways, like the 2:1 balancing mechanism, and the map layout. The 2:1 system basically means that one basic demon creep spawn is a match for basic 2 human creep spawns. It feels really good!

For todays update, based on the to-do I posted last time, I knocked off the following items:

Add normal gate tech to main demon gate
At least 3 more fleshed out heroes

The first took all of 30 seconds but the 3 heroes took all day! It's good to have a baseline for 2v2 now. Dryxx, Sparrowhawk, and the Old One join Agony for 1/3 of the planned heroes.

After playing a lot today to test out custom abilities, I'm leaning heavily towards fallback gates/outpost spawning to buffer the sudden lane surge against anyone who loses a flanking outpost/gate. I'll put in the gate and outpost rebuilding next, and then scoring to see how that affects the balance first.

After that I'm going to move up the basic item store in priority to get a rein on the economy. Then if I find that versus AI is in scope the game will really become fun to test. The final creep upgrade path will become evident soon after (hopefully addressing my concern about the creep upgrade paths being too light).

Creep controlling systems should fall in to place when I tackle Lord Brogan, as his command abilities and the Order abilities should overlap nicely.

Artifact and hero implementation will require most of the remaining dev time, certainly followed by balancing and testing, and aesthetic improvement.