Going to try to get back to logging Grotto work. Right now I am working on stuff every Saturday up until the DMA thesis show next spring. Recently we gave npc’s a flag to ‘illuminate’ if they’re carrying a candle drop, I added some icon bullets for doors to show state, and on saturday we added locked doors to stairwells and added keys. Over the last few weeks we’ve done a lot of tweaking to the auto poetry for room descriptions and I cleaned and cultivated a few new text corpuses to generate room descriptions at different depths of the dungeon. These still need to be tweaked, and I’d like to get a better handle on how the markovify functions have moved around since my original ones in order to keep making little adjustments.

The biggest thing that needs to happen between now and the show is the addition of graphics, bringing in the tile-painting art style I’ve been experimenting with. That’s a whole separate project right now that uses pixi.js to display Tiled tilemaps, but it’s still pretty early. For my fall group show I did a series of experiments just with tile painting, omitting any interactivity, in order to come up with a visual language that can be used for the game.

Immediate tasks that I plan to take on in the next week-

  • the options at the bottom of the character view are confusing depending on the context. There need to be different options depending on if a character is yours, someone elses, or a new one you just rolled
  • if there’s going to be a mobile view, it should be usable. take a swing at designing a mobile layout
  • revisit wireframes for a layout that includes the graphics window so we’ll be ready for it

Stuff for Paul to look at next week-

  • keys have stopped locking and unlocking doors
  • npc’s can pass through locked doors