I announced last week that “True King” will be exhibiting at GDEX (Game Developer’s Expo – https://www.thegdex.com/ ) on the weekend of October 12 – 13, 2019 in Columbus, Ohio. That’s in 2 weeks! And it will be the first public showing of gameplay outside of Michigan!
… well, I hope it’ll be playable by then.
GDEX 2019 looks to be a fun time in Ohio!
The WordPress interface says I’ve published over 200 articles on this blog. Cool!
In the past couple of months, I’ve updated the website for “True King” to be a bit more up-to-date (the first time I’ve updated it since 2017). Notice it contains a new video, private to YouTube and only available to view on the site, giving a glimpse of the current state of the game’s environment. I’ve tried to push the site to Google’s indexing system, but unlike the past, I notice Googling “true king game” doesn’t bring up my game in the early results, one of many issues that will no doubt affect the game when it eventually releases.
But today, I want to focus on new developments I’ve added to the game: a character-creation system at the beginning, and an internal ‘cutscene’ system that takes place during gameplay.
A screenshot of the official website for “True King,” as of 2019/08/25
Wow… almost 3 months without a blog post. That seems bad.
Actually, I’ve made some progress on my indie game development, and have been slowly showing parts of my progress at a local game dev meetup. And slowly, I’ll be posting that content here as well. I hope to have a lot more from “True King” in the near-coming months.
For now, let’s talk about the complex gameplay pitch. I haven’t really done that on this site all this time.
Making comics in my spare time provides a lot of memes to reference.
While I’ve procrastinated on this for some time, I finally got around to implementing a game feature this month. A big part of my game “True King” will be a turn-based strategy mode, held on a map grid between two armies, like “Fire Emblem” or “Final Fantasy – Tactics.” Or, more generally, like Chess or Checkers. I had already made a prototype where the enemy character AI moved randomly (see that article here from… 18 months ago?!?). Now, the enemy AI knows where your players are, and knows to move towards you, to create the illusion of a somewhat tactical army.
How does one create artificial intelligence for this type of thing? It’s a basic concept, and I’ll talk about how I did it.
Trust me, you can’t hide from the AI.
It’s been quiet lately. This is the long “labour day” weekend, a chance to dedicate more time to my game. Also a chance to write a post on what I’ve done since the last time I wrote on this blog.
I remember saying on Twitter I intended to have a fully-playable demo by early August. That has already come and gone… but I have finished something important: the GUI.
Basic GUI during regular part of game.
