The Fool's Path | devlog 3

Another day, another devlog

I wanted to make one of these about every two weeks and it's been 17 days and I've added a lot.  

I added randomized trees. This made a huge improvement to how the game looks. Before I had one low poly pine tree model that I used for all trees. This looked very unnatural. So I searched on sketchfab for a better pine tree model. I found a collection of really good ones for 3 dollars. Now when I spawn a tree it randomly chooses between 3 different pine tree models The difference in tree height gives the game a lot more depth. Now the unwalkable tree areas look like thick forest which is what I wanted. The model collection also came with rocks, mushrooms, and stumps. So I added all of those. I increased the size of one of the mushrooms to be gigantic. To give the game more of a fantasy feel. 

I also added a wizard character. I got the model for free on sketchfab or some other 3d model site. It's very low poly but it's animated and doesn't look to bad from far away. The wizard has a fireball spell and can hit things with his staff. The animations on the model came in one big long animation. So I had to use code to play only chunks of the big animation. It's a bit janky but these models are placeholder anyway.

Another big thing I added was a follow button. Toggle the follow button and the other 2 characters will follow the selected character. This makes a huge difference because you don't need to move each unit individually. It also makes encountering enemies better because your party isn't all spread out. It's still a bit buggy and characters sometimes overlap. I need to write some code that if characters are overlapping move one character to the next free tile. 

I also added an explosive barrel. Some one made me the barrel model with a explosion animation. I liked the explosion animation a lot so I use it for the fireball explosion now as well. The barrel is moveable like the box and can be used to press floor switches or blow up barriers. I also added destructible barriers. Just a pile of rocks and branches. It blocks your path until you shoot it with a fireball or place the explosive barrel next to it and blow it up. I have ideas on another character I want to add. A goblin sapper. I want it to carry this explosive barrel. They will charge at you and blow themselves up. I had this character in the 2d version of this game and it added a lot to the combat. 

Another thing I added was water tiles. All the terrain in the game is made of tiles, so why not water tiles to be able to paint in rivers and ponds. They are just like any other unwalkable tile but I use a shader to animate them to look watery. It took hours of tinkering with shaders  that I got chatgpt to write me. I think I got it looking as good as I can. it still looks blocky, but the shader hides it a bit.

I spent hours and hours redoing the UI about 3 different times so far. I used midjourney to generate some art for the UI. This is surprisingly time consuming. I'm new to using it but getting it to spit out something I liked took a while. Maybe generating art is cheating, I don't know how I feel about it. All I know is I need something as a place holder and this is the quickest way. maybe if I had money I would pay  someone, but I'm broke. I'm probably going to redo the UI again but I got it some what ok looking. It's just borders around text, I think I need to use more icons, because not everyone speaks English. UI has always been hard for me for whatever reason. 

One thing I still need to work on is something people on reddit pointed out. Switching between characters when they are far apart can be jarring. So you would just smoothly animate the camera moving from one unit to another. The problem is that each unit has it's own camera. I would need to restructure how the game is setup to make this happen. Someone suggested a ghost camera added on that lets you do all sorts of stuff with cameras. This would mean I would need to learn how to use it. So I'm putting it on the back burning for now. 

Tonight I tried adding a lightning attack to the wizard character. I wanted the wizard to be able to shoot a beam of lightning at enemies. I've done this in 2d before and it was easy, but in 3d it is way harder. I tried spawning a mesh and stretching it out from the wizard to the target. I couldn't get it to look right so I think I need another approach. Maybe I could use particles to simulate a beam and just fire a projectile to do the damage. 

If I get this amount of progress every two weeks I am in good shape. Holding this whole game in my head at once is impossible. So I compartmentalize and just work on one thing at a time. Only when I go to write a devlog does the scope of the game become apparent and I get overwhelmed. I'm sure I missed something but this is everything I can think of.

A demo of the game is playable right now. It's a old version of the game. This weekend I'm going to work on getting things put back together so I can upload another demo with all the new stuff. 

https://jhyde.itch.io/thefoolspath

https://twitter.com/J_Hyde_