No new build posted, but I worked on the Library Town Tile tonight.

The Library is a Town tile, which spawns a Librarian who gives quests!  This is the primary way to add objectives to a Tile Set in HexDev.  My current thought process is that each different town tile may have an NPC which wants different types of objectives.

Library – Rare artifacts
Taxidermist - Rare/Epic monster parts
Lumber Mill – Crafting materials

Personally, I think this is a place where a system like StoryBricks could shine.  The behaviour of the NPCs that spawn in the Town Tiles could use their system to drive their desires and the players actions could affect how they feel.  Come on guys, where’s my Unity API!  :)

What do you think?  Like the idea or do you have an idea for an objective tile?

No new build today, but a brain dump of some stuff I’m thinking about and working on…

In HexDev, your character’s weapon skills are going to progressively improve the more you use them. I also want it to feel more organic instead of step like. Every game, you start at 0 proficiency with all weapon types. As you use the weapon successfully by defeating enemies or engaging in combat, you gain proficiency with the weapon type.

Techniques
Over time, you become more adept with the weapon type and feel more comfortable using it so you “integrate” new techniques into your basic attack. As you continue to use that weapon type, you gain more and more “techniques” until you become a Master with the weapon type.

Abilities
Over the course of gaining proficiency with a weapon type, you may also gain new abilities which you can activate at will.

At the beginning of the game, every player is equipped with “bare hands”.  If the TileSet designer provides shops to purchase new weapons, players have to find them before they can obtain different weapons.  So here is a quick preview of the combat mechanics I am working on for the Bare Hands weapon type.  I may integrate more techniques in between these, just to improve the organic flow of the combat mechanics, but we’ll see.

Bare Hand Weapon Preview
Techniques:
20 – One Two Punch
40 – Snap Kick
60 – Double Fist Flame – Adds a flame DoT to the target.
80 – Roundhouse Kick
100 – Back Spinning Kick – Adds a knockback effect.

Abilities
30 - Roll – Player tumbles in the current attack direction for a short distance
50 – Foot Sweep – Knock down the target.
70 – ??

I’ve been working on the play controls for HexDev since I started looking deeper into the combat system.  After talking to some people about it, I went forward with the initiative to change the control style over to a Spiral Knights style instead of traditional Mouse Click RPG.  I think it feels better so far, but I’d like to get the community’s opinion!

Here’s your task, as a dedicated pre-alpha tester on HexDev:  I created a new page HexDevWADS on the blog with a new build that has these new controls (and Bomb Tower Tiles!) So…

1. Go play it -> HexDevWADS.  I recommend creating lots of Grass Tiles (they spawn Blue Cube Enemies) if you want to see combat.
2. Add comments to the page about the game in general, things you want to see, things you hate, particularly about the control style within the context of this game.  Bugs are expected, but you can report those too.
3. Answer this poll so I can see at a glance what you think!
4. Subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on Twitter for updates!

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Thanks!

Can’t work from home now because of flood water in my basement, but now that I’m back at work, lunch breaks are devoted to HexDev!  Today I added some explosion, damage, and tracking logic to Bomb Tower Tiles.

For the explosions, I used the Detonator package for Unity.  Thanks to Ben Throop for writing this!  Such a huge time saver.

I published a new build too, so check it out!

Working on the cow bell I talked about… it’s called a Bomb Tower Tile.

Bomb Tower Tiles are “Objective” tiles, meaning that they add some objectives to the game for the player to achieve.  The objective part of adding this tile to a map is to “Destroy all bomb towers”.

Bomb Tower Tiles will have a destructible tower that throws bombs at nearby players.  When the bomb hits the ground, it explodes in an AoE fire damage that burns for a certain time.

Posted a new HexDev build with a couple (not many) new “features”.

• Persisted Worlds!  Make your maps and save em!
• Beautified water tiles.
• WADS movement support (playing with this idea still)

Needs more cowbell though… maybe next update will have more cowbell…

HexDev isn’t completely dead, I’ve been thinking about it and tinkering with a lot of things. So here’s the shakedown of what has happened since April.

• A whole lot of nothing.
• Decided to add networking for multiplayer.
• Made the grids serializable to save and share maps.
• Copied everything.
• Broke everything.
• Installed DropBox to keep my files synchronized between places where I actually work on the project, so I don’t spend 30 minutes prepping to work and then hate how much time I’ve wasted and stop working.
• Starting playing Lord of the Rings Online again (crap, there goes my development time).
• Decided to remove networking because multiplayer is a giant pain the butt AND it’s seriously slowing me down.
• Going to add more gameplay to the single player version and run with it.

So, here goes nothing, again.  Update later this week (with editable and savable maps maybe?)