Castle Kilburn – Update

Warrior Charge Special Attack

I think I’m starting to settle on a formalized name, I was tossing around the idea of Castle Kilburn or Escape From Castle Kilburn. However, my gut tells me to go with the shorter name. Either way I’ve tried to refocus my development efforts into core mechanics that push me closer to a playable state.

I think its really important right now to get to a playable state to avoid project burnout, the things I’m working on are very time consuming and as a solo dev I could easily get bogged down or lose interest. So this is the list I’ve implemented and its helped keep my work focused on the ever important “playable state” goal.

I’m happy with my procedural generation at this point and I created a new Tile class that keeps track of various parameters such as movement cost, current occupant, tile type. This has formalized movement and allowed me to work on special abilities as shown above.

I revamped the scene loading mechanism, I’ve opted to not allow the player to return to a previous level once going down the stairs. This has allowed me to keep the number of scenes to a minimum of three right now:

Menu,Dungeon,Shop. I use a modulus operator to check the scene at load time, if modulus 3 == 0, then we load a shop level. So basically the player gets the opportunity to shop every three levels. This may get tweaked once combat is done and more testing is performed.

I’ve revamped the shop graphics to match what is shown throughout the dungeon, I do have plans to implement more dungeon graphics as the player continues through the levels. I will need a backstory as to why this shop keeper is here and why we’re escaping a castle dungeon by going down… or maybe we just change the stairs to go up, unsure yet on this one.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed this brief update and the small window into my development process. Lots more to come, but I gotta get back to work.

Cheers,

Corey