3
Here's what I've come up with so far:
Controls:
Right Joystick - Move the active player in four directions. Each move diminishes the "Action Bar" beside the Inventory. Once all moves are complete, the focus shifts to the next character in the player's adventuring party.
Left Joystick - Move the selection cursor (yellow line) to highlight an item from the inventory to use, or change/use the current character's armor and weapon. When an item is selected (by pressing left fire button), use the joystick to move the targeting cursor to the desired target.
Left Fire Button - Equip/use the item the selection cursor is currently highlighting. First press readies the item and brings up the targeting cursor (blinking blue square). Second press activates the item.
Right Fire Button - Cancel item equip/use (eliminates blinking blue targeting cursor)
Dev Notes
I'm thinking gameplay would consist of selecting three characters of any class (using mostly generic fantasy archetypes like "Warrior", "Rogue", "Wizard", etc) to embark on a quest for treasure and kill-points.
Currently, the program stores to and retrieves from the stack the following properties: Character Class, Brawn, Agility, Knowledge, Hit Points, Weapon, Armor, Inventory1 & Inventory2. Most of these are not doing anything useful right now, but when the character focus shifts between your two party members you will see that character's weapon, armor, current hitpoints and inventory loaded from the stack into the bottom part of the display.
The idea of switching out the inactive player characters graphics with playfield pixels is to reduce flicker (either manual or via batari's built-in multiplexing). Ultimately, it would be great to switch in GRP0 graphics on the fly, so that whichever character (whether a player-character or enemy) had the focus would be able to move unrestricted and flicker-free. It might also be a good idea to develop an AI that would avoid placing more than two enemies/items in a row at any given time... but that's neither here nor there at this point.
To demonstrate the stack feature is working, you can try walking into any of the enemies. In the full game, this would trigger a combat test, but for now it just depletes the current character's hitpoints. I'm hoping to use the stack in a similar way to load the stats and inventories of on-screen enemies during their turns, and carefully pull up the relevant stats of targets whenever necessary.
The Equip/Use does nothing right now, except to demo the interface itself. The idea is that the left joystick/fire-button is used for equipping and using items and missile weapons, while the left joystick/fire-button is used for moving the characters around the map.
The source is still lame and uncommented, so I'll have to clean it up a bit before posting. One thing that I've been trying - and, so far, failing
- to do is to adapt SeaGTGruff's inventory strip for the DPC. The inventory I cobbled together for this demo is clunky and extremely limited, but a more flexible one would probably enhance gameplay quite a bit. Frankly, there's enough gray-matter flowing around these parts for lots of nice features (Savekey, Vox, etc). For now, this is more of a mockup and food-for-thought than a true demo, I guess. But part of me feels like together we come come up with a fairly badass VCS RPG.
DungeonRaid_demo_082211.bin 32K
61 downloads"What do you think, sirs?"
Edited by jrok, Tue Aug 23, 2011 12:33 AM.
I'll mention this anyway, When one characters turn is over, I often end up moving the next character a few steps before I realize it. It'd be great if there was a delay between switching characters, maybe have the character that's being switched to blink a few times, or highlight in some way, before switching to it.
