The main focus of the work since the last dev log was to lay down the basis of the building system. Buildings in Westward will eventually play an important role, as they will allow the players to trade, manage and exchange information, and organize the settlement. Specific buildings will also be necessary for the settlements to gather resources and set up military defenses.
Most of this is not implemented yet. For now, you can enter buildings by clicking on them, making your character walk to the entrance and enter. “Entering” means that the menu will open. That menu will offer the usual sections, available at any time in the game (inventory, crafting …), plus a set of building-specific menus corresponding to functions that the building you entered serve. At the moment, the only available function is trading: you can enter the trade post and buy or sell items. Very basic, very common in online games, but essential to build upon towards more advanced features.
The fact that the buildings simply correspond to additional menus might be slightly disappointing, but that’s sufficient for a prototype of the game. I don’t exclude making “real” buildings in the future, although it doesn’t strike me as a necessity. I like the idea of buildings as places where the focus is on information and management, whereas the wide wild outside world is the setting of choice for exploration and action.
This may not seem much for three weeks of work, but a lot happened to get there. I made multiple iterations, experimenting with Phaser 3 scenes before deciding not to use them. I also rewrote all the UI code to make it much more clean and efficient. Now that all this is done, it should be possible to add building-related functionalities relatively fast, and thus to start implementing settlement-related game mechanics.
My goal for the next time is to start working on the world map (in the sense of a picture representing the whole game world), and already have a version of it displayed in Forts, where it could be interacted with in order to create new buildings. Going that way, the demo will gradually start to exhibit important aspects of gameplay specific to Westward!
Jerome Renaux
I'm an independent game developer, working mainly on browser-based multiplayer online game (HTML5 & Javascript). I love to discuss about all aspects of game development so don't hesitate to get in touch!
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