The pack has been busy this week and we are excited about what we’ve been working on. However, sometimes progress is hard to see. So lets talk about it!
Community
It is rather uncommon for us to have a heading that isn’t a subsection of Rogue Wolf, but I thought we would make an important exception here. We want community to be important to us, to our teammates, and to the players of our games and users of our software. Because of that, we made a Discord. It is very, and I mean very, empty and bare bones right now. I’m sure that if people join, then we will iterate on it more. For now, its me in an empty discord so lets not focus on it more than we already have. Feel free to join.
Unnamed Game Studio
We still want to name the studio so that has been bothering us. I’ve been playing with the idea of Rogwol Game Studio. Rogwol being and abbreviation of Rogue (ROG) Wolf (WOL) concatenated. An alternative to that would be just using Rogue Wolf Gaming, which is the boring option. I’d rather not be boring.
Bombseeker
The prototype has been completed and we have been playing around with it. The spin moves and spin markers have been tweaked slighting to make it less buggy. However, overall we haven’t been doing much to the free prototype. This will always be available on my public GitHub profile and can be found here.
This does mean that we are going to pivot to working on the release that will eventually make it to Steam store. That’s the goal at least, to get a game to the store. But before we do that, there are a lot of improvements that we would like to make. In order to accomplish that, we are started from the ground up.
Puzzle Algorithm
Prior to the refactor, the algorithm that generates the maps to play on was full of hard coded values and contained within the PuzzleContainer scene. Refactoring has allowed us to abstract that out more and utilize composition for puzzle generation. We can now pass in a configuration node to the PuzzleContainer and generate the puzzle based off of the configuration values. This way, we can create the randomized levels but regenerating the configuration, but also when we want to have fixed level designs, we can utilize the same configuration node to do so. This flexibility is going to be useful in the future.
Graphics
We are continuing to look for someone willing to create assets for Bombseeker. We would love to have someone give the game a unique and contiguous feel, something that I can’t achieve using downloaded assets. While the hunt for this person continues, we have continued to use assets that we can find online.
One thing that is very important for us moving forward is the legibility of the tiles and numbers. We will also want to make sure that the character is easy to see on the tilemap that we are utilizing.
There is one potential pivot that we might be making. There is some desire to make Bombseeker RPG within a 3D game space. It might allow us more freedom in the future. Because of that, we might want to make Bombseeker also in the same format. It would still be a top down puzzle game with a fixed POV, but the models would be 3D. However, we are still hoping to find someone to help with asset creation and this would make their job more demanding.
Summary
Bombseeker is making great progress and we are looking forward to seeing it make it to the store.
Rogue Wolf Tech
There is a realization that it would be nice to have a persistent save state across multiple systems. In order to achieve this, we are going to need some account management system. This way, Bombseeker players will be able to log in and tally their coins from everywhere they play. This will a containerized solution with a few micro services; auth, accounts, users, and an instance of Little Flagger. This has been put in progress, some written in GoLang and the rest written in PHP.
Conclusion
Productive is the word that I would use to describe this week. With all of the refactoring of Bombseekers as well as the work started on the control plane, we have been progressing well. While we are still in need to two teammates, and asset creator as well as a music producer for the game, we are optimistic about what is on the horizon. We hope you are too. Until next time.
Go Forth and Be Awesome