The very first playable demo of Westward is now online! You can “play” it at this address. Please note that this is a very, very rudimentary demo. It only allows to perform two things: walking around and opening/closing the (unfinished) menus. (Please also note that the sprites are borrowed and…
This dev log was delayed by a week because I was insanely busy with other stuff. This will be a short entry this time, because many of the biggest initial challenges (networking, world-building, management of huge maps…) have been solved already. I’m not saying that everything from now on will…
These have been productive two weeks, with significant progress in the direction of an actual game. Networking My first goal was to have all the networking functionalities up and running, which is now the case. There is not much to do yet in the game, but all is in place…
I have been following the Phaser 3 dev log for months now, getting increasingly more enthusiastic as the engine matures. Both in terms of performance and possibilities, it will be an amazing improvement over Phaser 2. When Phaser 3 hit beta 1 last week, I decided it was time to…
I’ve been almost fully back at work on the algorithms that I’ll use to eventually build the world for my game. As a reminder, a requirement for Westward is to have a very big world (“very big” still remains to be exactly defined), which calls for tools to automate the…
As the project is still in an early stage, I’m exploring a lot of different things to have a clear view of what could be done and how, and be able to plan accordingly. Therefore, I took a small break from procedural world building, to play with something entirely different:…
In the previous log, I discussed a way to manage a very large map, and raised the concern of having to actually populate such a big map. In this entry I’ll discuss a possible solution in the form of procedural terrain generation. Procedural terrain generation Procedural content creation is often…
This entry marks the beginning of the new dev (b)log category, where I’ll write short articles on a biweekly basis to discuss the progress I make and the challenges I meet on the projects I’m working on. These logs will typically focus on high-level overviews and gameplay examples, and usually…
Let’s decompose the term “custom binary protocol”. In networking, a protocol is a set of rules about how several entities should communicate. In the context of networked games, it is a convention about how to represent and parse the data that the clients and the server will exchange. Binary means…
Project Ensemble is an experiment in crowd design, where players, developers and artists collaborate to collectively design a browser-based multiplayer online game. Ensemble is currently suspended. There are plans for the future to revive the idea in a slightly different format. The source code of the project is available on…