gamecreator

I'm curious what that scene looks like if you temporarily delete the terrain.

Some ideas to flesh out the gameplay a bit more: Progression can be done via gaining experience, leveling and getting skills. Experience could be gained by killing monsters and solving puzzles (repeating a level should not count for more experience; see hub/level info below for why). Enough experience and you level. Each level gives you a skill point to choose in the skill tree. Skills help you complete levels. Skills can be kept simple for the scope of this project (usually involving modifying a variable). They can be respecced but only at the hub (not sure about any other limitations since this still seems like cheating; perhaps one respec per level?). Some skill ideas: +attack +health +jump height (or double jump, if we're feeling ambitious) +seek (attack could be straight at first but adding to seek skill lets it track enemies better; curve faster) +range (increase the range at which the spell can fire before fizzling out) Most of these should be very doable. I double we'll have time but we can do more extravagant spells and such later. Wizard's Tower world hub is, I think, settled. Wizard uses this to choose the next island he wants to explore. Again, for the sake of progression, he shouldn't be able to go everywhere at the start. The beginning should allow him to go to the introductory island, which should let him get level 2 if he kills all the enemies. Level 2 should unlock 2 or 3 islands. Level 4 should unlock more. Level 7 should unlock more. Etc. Island quests should go hand in hand with progressing the player to leveling and unlocking the next set of islands. How we want to do that is up to us. I suggest the first level just kill a few easy monsters. Maybe the next one is a jumping challenge, perhaps with moving platforms. Maybe another is a puzzle level. Each achievement rewards in experience. If I was working on this by myself, this is how I would do this. The beautiful thing here is that this is all modular. We don't need to do everything to have a fun game and even if we decide to go this route, I don't expect a lot of it to be implemented. Thoughts?

No problem with Slasraf taking on the wizard. Happy to have him help (I removed the issue from bitbucket because I didn't know how to unassign myself). If he's doing an air enemy as well maybe I'll prepare a ground one as a placeholder.

That should be about the same size as the second image in my post. That's probably the area an intro level/island should be, in my opinion. But again, it depends on what we want the player to do in the 1st level.

To get an idea of scale, I loaded up the model in the editor and put the 6 foot tall wizard on it. He's the little black dot the red arrow is pointing to. The terrain looks like it's 1,000 meters (or 3,281 feet) square. As contrast, the below is a 10th of the size. I think the ideal size, at least for the first level, is closer to the second than the first. Depends on what we want to do there. Should it be just an introductory level where we kill a few monsters and call it a day? Or will there be more of a quest?

I added the wizard character so you guys can start playing with him but for now he's unanimated.

Logo, title screen and font (from here) are uploaded/committed. I'll get started on rigging and animating the 3D character unless something else is needed first.

Let's keep it simple for now. Here's a mockup based on the stuff I'm gonna upload tonight. We will likely change name and maybe get a graphical background later in development.

We're using the Leadwerks character controller, right? If so, that has a strict size so it makes sense to have a 5 or 6 foot high character (around 180 cm). We can scale anything we create in the editor's model viewer. As for the first level, it depends on what we want the player to do. Normally this would be an introductory tutorial level where the player learns to move and jump in a safe area, then is sent to kill 5 enemies or something to complete the level. But we could get more use out of the level if people have other ideas.

OK, I'll animate that one. I'll start with the basics first: idle, run, jump, cast (like shooting a fireball from the hand), hit and death. The good news is that it's solid colors so we can easily make different colored wizards if we want (red versus blue, for example). I'm also going to need to educate myself on how to upload to bitbucket (though I don't mind sharing files here).

Some more here: https://www.cgtrader.com/free-3d-models?keywords=wizard https://www.cgtrader.com/free-3d-models?keywords=mage This one could work as well: https://www.cgtrader.com/free-3d-models/character/fantasy/cartoon-wizzard

Agreed with Rick. The community has never really finished anything before and we can expect that at least half the team will lose interest by the end of the month. Let's do bite-sized chunks/phases at a time and plan the next phase as we wrap up the current one.

I like it! And it's only 25k triangles!!

I like those too. I was also just looking through other sites (checking one more after this). Two more options: https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/rigging-gnome-3d-model-1194853 https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/characters/humanoids/toon-witch-126942 And yes, the licenses are below the download button, in the description for the sketchfab ones (CC Attribution).

We can grab something from here: https://sketchfab.com/search?features=downloadable&q=wizard&sort_by=-pertinence&type=models or here: https://sketchfab.com/search?features=downloadable&q=mage&sort_by=-pertinence&type=models or any other search you may like (that's free and downloadable). If you guys like something, I'll download and animate it, unless we have an artist on the team.

Awesome! I imagine this can be made to work with save/load files as well, if our game gets big enough to warrant one.

You got it. So, to be clear, you want a separate "Powered by Leadwerks" screen and then the title/menu screen that says "forth" / community project? Or all together? Also, what are we doing in options? Are we going deep with music and sound volume controls, resolution settings? If so, maybe plain text is the way to go. I can find a nicer free font than Arial.

Sounds good to me too. We can tweak just how much the bullet turns per frame (use a variable) so it's not too easy either. I think it's a given that we want some challenge.

Since there are several people who want to design maps and we don't know how fast we'll get things done, it does make sense to make them individual, smaller scenes. We could technically go from level to level. Slastraf, is there a particular reason you want an extra hub world? Seems like that effort could be put toward creating another playable level.

For small maps (not exploration) I'm sure it won't be an issue. If we're doing level creation entirely in a modeling program, paths also shouldn't be a problem. Pretty sure Max and Blender allow snapping of geometry onto other geometry (kind of how I snapped a road to terrain via code here).

What would we export/import? The heightmap or the model? Because then we also need to think about vegetation. If we export a heightmap, we can use Leadwerks vegetation (and paint roads/paths). Otherwise it gets tricky.

I could probably create something in Max but I'm good with compromising and using normal Leadwerks terrain with either a single-color grass texture or a stylized/cartoon grass texture.

Here's a first version. I believe this is the 4th community project. And I could not, for the life of me, find a working logo link so I could send you a transparent PNG. Do you want graphical menu buttons like Start, Options, Quit? If so, which ones? Or are you doing text for that?

Agreed that we should at least have at theme/setting, something uniting the game and giving us some focus. Are we in a medieval fantasy world, modern, future (perhaps with aliens)? Abstract is fine too but that should be made clear up front. Some shots for inspiration.

Slastraf also started a poll earlier: https://www.leadwerks.com/community/topic/17640-vote/?tab=comments#comment-114649