Wake Up - The Origins of Queen's Heart · 3:10am Nov 23rd, 2018
A few of you have asked about Queen’s Heart, and whether or not I’m still continuing my work on that now that I’m working on Wake Up.
If you haven’t read about Queen’s Heart in my previous blog post, or even if you have, here’s a more detailed explanation of what it is:
In Queen’s Heart you play as Queen Chrysalis (or any other Changeling queen - you can change your name), and after the Royal Wedding invasion you’ve come up with a new idea on how to extract love out from under the now watchful eye of ponies everywhere. Your new idea involves a storefront in the red-light district of Canterlot. You’ll turn a one-off love shack into a foothold with which to once more invade Equestria, using vast stores of love to wage war against the Equestrian crown. Take control of the day-to-day operation of a love-gathering scheme right in the middle of the pony capital. Avoid detection, grow your influence, sequester love or use it to spread your power, and rise to the point where nopony but yourself can decide the fate of you or your Changelings.
For those of you whose interest I’ve piqued, I have good news and bad news. I’m definitely still working on it. But I may not ever get it to a point where I’m interested in releasing it.
Take for example the most recent version I actually got off the ground. It’s rudimentary, mostly a basic framework, and took around 40 hours of my time to build. I basically put no story content into it whatsoever except for a basic 3-stage introtorial to prototype a few features.
There are a lot of gameplay mechanics I’m really proud of in this version. First, I’ve built a whole game "engine" from scratch, using shiny new HTML5 technology that’s built to look great on your computer, tablet, or phone. That encompasses things like save/load, game state, an event-based scene transition system, hint and error tooltips, and a whole bunch of additional polish.
Here’s what the main menu looks like.
Since I built the framework up from scratch, I was able to do a lot of things that were really specific to this idea. One of these items was a fully modular disguise editor, which let you control and edit the disguise of one of your Changelings at will. Another was the stats tracker (top left) and auras radar (bottom left) which work together to tell you about yourself and the ponies around you.
Here’s what those features look like.
For the technically curious, I developed this using Angular.js (No, not Angular, I’m bad at learning new things). As it stands it’s a bit of a monolith, but bounds ahead of anything I had developed earlier. I had a grandiose idea for how to architect the next version using a bunch of cutting-edge cloud technologies like distributed graph databasing, static and dynamic CDN, serverless compute, etc. It’s way too scatterbrained and theoretical to even talk about at length, but I occasionally get really excited about it and all of the sudden I’ve sunk another 20 hours into it.
To show off where this came from, here is some info from a previous version designed in (another) hand-built game engine this time using Python and the Pygame Library. In this version I got much further on the interface design (notice the cute 2D-ish bugpones) but didn’t ever get a solid working event system in place. I eventually scrapped this project because my studies (and real life work experience) started leaning towards web development. I’d love to come back to this one some day, but every time I look at the code it reminds me of how much I hate desktop application programming. You get so much more power in a native app, but you also have to build so many more supporting pieces to even do the simplest things. One great example of this is how I got scrolling text to work in game. In order to do this, I’m basically running a second screen in the background to hold any text that need to be able to scroll. I have to capture scroll input, adjust the pane positioning, temporarily attach this to the view, force a render, all for something that I’ve never had to give much thought to in a web app.
Here’s what the main menu looks like. Note how it looks a bit more game-y and customized.
Here’s what the character selection screen looks like.
Two things that made it into the Python version that I’ve yet to get into the web version are a trait system, and some graphics. In this version you see the trait selection system, which lets you pick a skill or attribute that affects your character’s skills, abilities, and reactions. You’ll also notice the static graphics in this one. They took me a bit of time to put together, but they’re basically flat renderings of close-to-spec community vector art for the characters. In the new version I intend to have similar graphics, limited in terms of how often they show up, but with much more customization and editing. You’d be able to change the color of Queen Chrysalis’s hair (for example) or visualize how your disguise looks.
Here’s what the loading screen looks like.
I’m really proud of both the behind-the-scenes architecture as well as the presentation of this screen. One thing you see here that I’ve since kind of scrapped is the colored stats. In this version I had a loose idea of a specific in-universe character representing that trait (e.g. AJ=Strength, Twilight=Intelligence, RD=Agility, Chrysalis=Charisma, Luna=Will, Celestia=Power). It was pointless and went nowhere. It’s these kind of things you design with the best intentions but realize eventually that they serve no purpose. This is just yet another reason that game design is so difficult.
I must start by saying you do great UI work!
Game dev really gets my motor running I need to avoid being long winded but to start wow modern web tech looks amazing and from what I can gather about the style of game you are producing it seems to be great fit especially with that easy access to web networking architectures if you decide to fit some clever multi-user interactions into the game or even just chat hubs (I know you likely don't intend to release I'm speaking from a place of doing it for fun and passion and personal achievement)
As for your fun with scrolling text, working with text is hell people take for granted just what goes on under the hood for such a simple thing I couldn't believe it when I learned the hard way while trying to do it from scratch here is a little webm showing what I've managed to do with this powerful foe.
as far as scrolling it in how you discuss it can be made a child to a frame and then use the stencil buffer or fragment shader to keep it from bleeding out of said frame.
I'll stop myself there I'm always open to talking game dev anytime to anyone that may also be reading this.
To you Debug I wish you all the luck and hope your passions bring you many struggles and triumphs!