Here I demonstrate a bunch of progress — new things like character creation, shops, an inn where you can save your game, a mana recharger, and a new style for the user interface.
I also made a small change to the graphics – a new floor and ceiling style. I’m in the process of customizing the dungeon graphics, and plan to show an update on that in the next demo video.
I’ve got spellcasting working in my dungeon crawler now. Step by step it’s coming together.
I’ve already made huge progress beyond this and can’t wait to share.
A summary of my experience building and writing code for multi-user dungeons.
Much of this has been documented on this very blog (like the Basternae/ModernMUD posts from 2007-2013).
Now that I understand coroutines in Unity, I’ve built the combat system for my dungeon crawler RPG. Here’s a demo.
The next things I want to work on are spellcasting and making the UI look nicer.
I learned the basics of computer programming by trying to program text-based games on ancient Commodore hardware, which wasn’t ancient at the time.
All this code has of course been lost to the sands of time.
The very first programming I ever did was game programming.
It started with my Commodore VIC-20 in 1984. The computer’s manual had some BASIC programs you could type in and run. One was a Space-Invaders-type game.
Well, naturally, after typing in this game and playing it for a bit, I wanted to start making changes to enemy colors, speed, and score values. This was how I started programming.
It continued when I got a Tandy 1000 EX that ran MS-DOS and started writing games in GW-BASIC. By now I was coding much more detailed and complex programs. They were still text-only (ASCII), but I was creating them from scratch, and they had much more detailed mechanics.
I remember well a text-based gladiator combat tournament game that I spent the better part of a year working on, at about age 10, in addition to a few text-based adventure games.
Later, as the Internet started to grow, I became interested in multi-user dungeons. There were various codebases — Diku, Merc, Envy, Circle, and others. Not only did I work on some existing games, I also created my own, starting with Illustrium Arcana, and later with the Basternae rewrite, Basternae 3: Phoenix Rising. If you look at the “Basternae and ModernMUD” topic on this blog, you’ll see that I was working on them well into 2013.
When I was finishing my college degree in 2004, I took some classes for credit at The Game Institute and got a job with a company working on simulators for the US Army (among other government contracts). It was basically a video game company, but replace “fun” with “realism”. I didn’t really work on any graphics code, and ended up specializing in audio and network communications. This was the first and last job I had in video games.
My strong knowledge of audio programming and networking protocols took me on to develop parts of the Authentic8 SILO browser, work on a home automation system, and build the various audio applications I released as Zeta Centauri.
Now I’m returning to my roots and learning Unity. It’s incredibly intuitive, and the programming is easy and natural thanks to the many years I spent writing C# code.
I’ve started with the “Complete C# Unity Game Developer 2D” course available through Udemy. I’m about 50% of the way through, and the deep, thorough coverage coupled with real hands-on coding projects has been great for the learning process. I’m definitely going to take more of the Gamedev.tv courses because they really know how to teach.
There’s a game engine designed for building massively multiplayer online games. It’s called Multiverse. It was originally a proprietary engine, but it went open source at the beginning of the year when the company that created it went out of business.
I played with it a bit back in 2010 before I left Ohio. When I moved to California in the second half of 2010 I ended up working in the same building as Multiverse, Inc. They were winding down the company when I arrived and I ended up buying one of their old computers, a monitor, and an office chair. I met the founder, Bill Turpin, who also happened to work with the database admin where I was working when they were both at Netscape.
A while later they open sourced the project. I didn’t have the spare attention cycles to dig into it for the first few months, but started tinkering with it again in April. It’s a lot of fun to play with, but needs a lot of work, especially in the ease-of-use area.
I joined the development team and have been contributing the occasional bugfix. To find out more visit this website:
www.multiversemmo.com