I have encountered the term “vertical slice” a lot in the past few weeks. In the game dev world, it’s used to describe a particular kind of game prototype that is suitable to show to publishers. The idea is that it’s important to focus on conveying the key aspects of…
Pathfinding is a technique that consists in computing the shortest path between two points. It is ubiquitous in video games to compute the paths that AI-controlled NPCs should follow, or even to compute the path that the player character should take in games where the player doesn’t directly control the…
Westward is a collaborative MMORPG where the players have to build a nation. “The story of the creation and defense of communities, the mastery of the land, the development of an economy, and the formation of a nation.” (Quoted from Wikipedia about a certain epoch of US history). Starting from…
Tilemaps are great data structures to store all kind of useful information about your game world. However, if you world is very big (like, several million tiles in width and height), you will have to deal with a correspondingly big map, of potentially enormous size. In that case, loading the…
Progress has been made on various fronts to the extent that several gameplay loops will soon be closing in. The battle interface has been improved a bit, while multiplayer battles are now possible. On the economic front, buildings are now functional, in the sense that they can build themselves and…
In a previous tutorial, we looked at how to make a basic multiplayer online game with Phaser, Node.js and Socket.io. Hopefully you managed to clone the repository and have it run locally, but what if you want to put it online? There is a wide range of platforms on which…
Over the past few weeks, Westward has seen significant progress on two fronts: creating and accessing the world map on the one hand, and the battle system on the other hand. The latter now introduces and adversarial component to the demo, making it finally fit the definition of a game!…
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…
Most of the visible progress since the last dev log pertains to the completion of the inventory and equipment systems. The corresponding menu was already visible since a few weeks, but it is now fully functional. This means that it is now possible to use and equip items. In order…
The two main improvements of these past two weeks are the completion of the crafting system and the addition of forests to the landscape. Several smaller additions have been made as well. These changes have been uploaded and are visible in the demo. The demo can be played at this…