2020-03-28

Wow. Already been a month since I started working on this project. Kind of crazy how quickly that time just… disappeared.

Anyway, today I started working on some random generation utilities. Not a lot of this was new work — I’ve already done 90% of that job in SCORLIB. My factories are serving me well, so far. But, in order to actually test and make sure the random generation is producing sensible results — for some definition of sensible, I guess — I needed a way to hammer generation without loading up game levels.

Enter SCORLIB CMD:

(Naming things is hard.)

Essentially, I wanted a command line utility I could use to generate the things I tell it to generate. I want to be able to inspect the output of this generation in a game-agnostic way just to see how things work and make sense, because this is how I think about things. This is not a way to test game balance (though in the future it might get some features like that), nor to test anything specifically game related at all.

Say I want to see what treasure a gordix1 drops:

Or I want to see a full list of possible drops:

This is a very simply use case; the screenshots are just illustrative. Because this game is going to be fairly loot-driven, I need to iron out how “good” the loot drops themselves feel. I think this is the first step to making sure it’s all right. Once I have a decent amount of Things for monsters to drop, I can throw them into the game and then run around and test there. …after I implement the inventory system…

2020-03-29

Cleaned up SCORLIB a little and had it load some item properties that weren’t being read from data files. Then I started work on a proper Inventory screen. Not much to show yet – still rough work, and I think I need to step away from the code and use a pen and paper to sketch possible layouts before I do any more work.

2020-03-30

I spent 2 hours modding Fallout 4 today. So, in other words, I was not productive at all.

2020-04-01

Brain is feeling fried this evening. Tinkered with the Inventory screen some more. Decided to probably start off from something like the ADOM inventory screen, more or less, and go from there. Figured they got something good going. I got just a little bit done as far as drawing everything up properly – not enough to show or feel productive about.