Developer Log
Stay up-to-date as we improve Constelleum, document our process, and generally post about the stuff that we enjoy! We’d love to have you follow along, so make sure to subscribe to the RSS feed or get on our mailing list!
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Developer Log 8
Cleaning up the Lobby - Mitch
This week I’m reporting in for Alex who has been hard at work on our new lobby system. This new system is going to provide a number of great benefits for our development pipeline as well as the future player base.
As a small development team we rarely have enough players for a full match of Constelleum. Because of this we often need to play with unconventional game configurations like two versus one. In order to do this we needed to restart the server with new parameters which just slowed things down. More recently we’ve been using this very simple lobby system depicted below.
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Developer Log 7
Still Here - Mitch
It has been a loooong time since we posted our original dev blog articles as an experiment about a year ago. At the time we were still fledgling and figuring out where we wanted to take Constelleum. And the good news is that our lack of posts was because we had our heads down working hard to bring our game to life. Now that we are getting close to an alpha state it feels like a good time to start sharing what we’ve been up to.
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Developer Log 6
Sandbox - Matt
This week I implemented a Sandbox mode in our game client. This allows us (and any player) to run the game locally and test cards and mechanics against dummy players. To accompany this, I also made a new map with clusters of obstacles. Here’s how it looks:
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Developer Log 5
Animation - Alex
This week Dev-Level animations were completed for the first three characters, Adrenaline, Flow, and The Elemantalist replacing Juggernaut, Grappler, and Archer.
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Developer Log 4
Bugs and Bugs and Bugs, Oh My! - Alex
Our first playtest in mid-April revealed nasty bugs already present in our still simple game. Players reported crashes when viewing their own hands on other player’s turns, starting positions were determined based on connection order instead of team (A feature -Mitch), and attacks that were not meant to deal damage could be buffed to deal damage. The bugs were fantastic to see and fascinating to squash, because they drew us deeper into the very powerful Godot engine.
Matt posted last week on how he implemented a Starting Position Phase to fix the initial violation of personal space.
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Developer Log 3
From Version to Version - Mitch
This past week the team switched over to the next version of the game, V5 to V6, so this felt like an opportune time to share a bit of our process. I can’t say it’s anything special, but it works for us so on some level that just means it works.
The first step is our roadmap. A while back we created a list of rough grain features that we thought were essential to our games completion. Using those features we project out about 2 months on our roadmap on Trello.
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Developer Log 2
Animation: When Push Comes to Shove - Alex
Time to get things moving. This week we attacked the first pass on animations, not letting ourselves sit on idle hands.
Before animation, the game state was updated as soon as a turn ended. For players not taking their turn, characters popped from point to point and swung an axe without moving a muscle. Fantastic material for theater of the mind, but a hint as to why your character is halfway to defeat is usually appreciated. You want to see fists fly, boots scoot, and heads bob.
During my original pass on some developer assets, I had put together some crude animations. As the reader will witness shortly, the graphic arts are not my strength. Each animation is two to four frames of 100 X 100 pixels made in GIMP. The frames are pixel art only because I had dabbled in making custom avatars for Kingdom of Loathing 10 years ago. The final art style, though still being discussed, will not be pixel art.
The following idle animations feature our placeholder characters:
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Developer Log 1
The Big Picture - Mitch
We recently asked for some help with narrowing down our name choice for the game. We asked friends, family, and the DayKnight community to take a short survey and with 20 responses these were the results with literally no context of the game.
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