Where Rooms Come From

I'm spending a lot of time using our editor to make rooms and then assemble the rooms into houses. Then I haunt said houses. It's good, wholesome fun!

Here then is a step by step account of making a room:

First we pick a size - they can be any size we want, but we have some pre-sets that we've named small, medium, large, etc...

Here, I'll make a large room, not a small one, so there's plenty of space for mayhem and terror.

Then I pick the textures for the walls and floors. I'm going for a parlor-type of room here, so some classy wallpaper and hard wood floors seems appropriate.

You'll see that I also put in some furnishings around the edges there - a desk, some suits of armor, some chairs and some plants. Obviously the room is still way too bare though...

A snooker table seems like it would be fun. An a couch, so I moved the chairs around to make space for the setee.

Next come the extra dressing and textures - a nice rug, some pictures on the walls, and a couple of windows. Now it's a room you might want to hang out in, which isn't the vibe we're looking for at all. Let's Haunt is up a bit.

Some bloodstains and footprints, grunge in the corners, tears in the wallpapter and thorns on the wall. Tip over a chair, tilt that paining. Something bad has happened here, and it's primed for something worse.

You'll notice there aren't any doors. Those come later, when we assemble the rooms in the house editor and slot them together. So any of the walls can have a door in them as needed. That room's not quite perfect. I'm not sure about those thorns if I'm honest. But it only took me about ten minutes to put together, which is pretty quick, I think, and is allowing a wide variety of terrible spaces where horrifying things can happen.

Haunts Kickstarter Begins NOW!

Follow this link to Kickstarter and pledge your undying (or undead) support now!

Countdown to Kickstarter The Second

Hey!

We're going to start a new Kickstarter to raise money to finish Haunts: The Manse Macabre. It starts on Monday, May 7 and will last 60 days. We need to get $25,000 to finish the game. Check back next week for all the exciting detail and the awesome video we shot last weekend.

User Interface Evolution

It might not look like it from our Web site, but we have been busy this past month. Busy, busy, busy indeed. For much of that time I was out in California working on a related project with our benefactors at the Open Game Labs, an organization about which very little has been made public, if only because there hasn't been a lot of info to share. There still isn't as it turns out, but after this last month we at least have a plan and a schedule and some idea what we're going to announce when.

But work on Haunts has proceeded apace, with Jonathan and Austing slaving away at the code and art mines respectively. Much of the recent work was about the User Interface, which is always a tricky thing to get right. We're not trying to reinvent the wheel here, and there are some good and bad examples of turn-based UI that we've looked at for inspiration. Our general guiding goal is to keep it as simple and useful as possible. None of us like UI elements that overlay the gameplay space, so we've framed out our controls and displays at the bottom of the screen (for the most part). Here's the evolution so far:

We started with a pretty big box, which had a space for information about whatever unit you might be targettng. The words like "Blinded!" refer to conditions (buffs and de-buffs) that the unit is suffering from. The names are mostly fun place-holders that Austin through in, although I really like Vexed!

We quickly decided that we didn't need to use all that screen real estate for info on the target - that we'll handle with a mouse-over pop-up on the screen. So, then we did this:

But that didn't actually make use of all the space along the bottom of the screen and felt cramped, so then we did this:

The pop-up infor panel for the Master of the Manse is too big there, but you get the idea. We were honing in on what we wanted for the bottom bar though. Next came:

Which brought us to this:

Which is pretty close to where we're ging to end up. We decided that some contextual info, like that stats for individual attacks will slide up from this box when you mouse over specific actions and condition, but that once you've played the game a few times you'll know what those powers do and thus won't need that info all the time. Maybe. We think.

User Interface is always a struggle to get right, but right now we're happy with what we've got going on, and it plays well. Oh, did I mention? It's totally a game you can actually play now, albeit a buggy one which crashes sometimes. But still, a game!

Much, much more soon.

Milestone Complete! Game Playable! Horror Continues!

Callooh! Callay! Mob Rules Games has met our first milestone, freeing up another $20,000 from Lewis Charitable Foundation for our development, which is great, since we were down to about $1200 in the bank!

The title of this milestone was “First Playable,” and that is exactly what we’ve got: a game that is playable, if simple and in need of a great deal more content. But it is playable, and we hit our deadline without sipping even an hour. Many congrats and thanks to Austin and Jonathan for their very hard work.

Here then were the items on our checklist for Milestone 1, all of which have been duly checked off:

Developer Tools

• Room Editor
  • Three room sizes - Complete. Swappable floors.
  • Swappable wall features - Complete: 2 picture frames.
• Map Editor
  • Two Floorplans - Complete. Can save any number of floor plans.
• Animation Editor - Complete. Using Ygraph w/ a modfied version of the game for just playing animations.

Playable Game Units

• Three Explorers - Complete. Hunter, Occultist, Teen.
• One Haunt Faction with representatives of each type. Complete- Ghosts.
  • Leader - Complete: Master of the Manse.
  • Servitors - Complete: Revenant Corpse, Vengeful Wraith.
  • Minions (AI controlled) -Complete: Angry Shade, Lost Soul Orb. Will attack anything in their LoS.
• Unique stats, art, animations, and powers for each playable unit. - Complete.

Game Mechanics

• Action Point based, turn system - Complete.
• Movement
  • Fog of War/Line of Sight - Complete.
• Combat
  • Select different attacks and powers - Complete.
  • Simple AI - Complete. Designated Haunt units are under CPU control and will move and attack automatically on the Haunt turn.

Multiplayer Modes

• Multiplayer: Pass and Play/Hot Seat turns - Complete.

It feels great to be where we are, and of course it’s now a little daunting to look at that long list of unfinished items for the next two months, but I couldn’t have asked for a better start.