Version 1.0 and Winning awards

It’s been a while since the last update, so there’s a quite a bit of news.

I’ll start with some great news. At Games Fleadh in LIT Thurles on March 12th, my team and I presented Trials of The Dolphin King where it took home the award for best original digital art.

Here is a screenshot from version 1.0, the version we presented:

Trials of the Dolphin king is to be presented next week as part of DIT’s project fair. In preparation, the finishing touches are being made to the game by the team.
I have implemented a systems by which enemies randomly choose which attack to make against the player during their turn. Some enemies, like the mook wing, only have a single damaging attack, while others, such as the vogon capital, are capable of fire lazers, missiles, and even healing themselves! This change really mixes up and adds depth to the game’s combat system.

How combat works: an update #1

Since the last update, the core principles of how combat is done has remained the same. However a few small changes have been implemented.

The first of which is the order in which everything is done. In the old version, it went

Declare who goes first at the start of the battle
player turn (if faster), where they pick an attack
enemy turn
player turn (if slower), where they pick an attack

In the current version, the players attack is chosen before anything else is resolved, and then it is carried out when their turn comes around. Not only does this method seem more intuitive, it also serves to fix several bugs that arose when trying to implement it the other way.

Another change implemented is how enemies do damage to the player and are loaded into the battle. In the old version, enemies did a static damage whereas now they have a minimum and maximum damage, which is randomly chosen whenever they attack the player.

In the current version, enemies are now loaded into the battle by a switch statement and an integer. There are 5 different enemies in the game, each stronger than the last. When the player flies through space, the area there are in effects what kind of enemies they encounter. For example, if the player flew around the starting area, there would be a high chance of encountering a Mook Wing, the weakest enemy in the game, but a small chance of encountering a stronger enemy as well.

Another important addition: rewards. At the end of every battle, the player will receive an amount of metal and fish as a reward for winning the fight. Much like damage, this is also a random value. Enemies have a minimum and maximum amount of fish and metal to yield on death.

Finally, we have a battle screen where combat takes place:

Combat in a nutshell

In Trials of the Dolphin King, a few situations can cause combat to occur. Maybe the player was just navigating around and happened to stumble upon a random encounter, maybe an event ended in a fight, or maybe it was a scripted combat encounter.

At any rate, the player is in a situation where it’s either do or die. Or run.

When combat occurs, the game goes to the battle screen and combat happens in a turn based fashion. The player will have 4 options:

Fire their lasers
Fire one of their missles
Use their dolphin cry
Attempt to flee

When they want to deal some damage to their attacker, it all boils down to the choice between lasers and missles. Lasers do a small amount of damage, and unlike missles are not 100% accurate. Their advantage is that they can be fired any number of times. Missles on the other hand, do a huge chunk of damage and always hit the target 100% of the time. The downside is that you only have a limited number of missles from the start of the game. They can however be bought from most trading posts.

The dolphin cry doesn’t do any damage at all, but reduces the accuracy of all enemy attacks.

And running is pretty self explanatory: both you and the enemy test your speed, and if you beat theirs, you escape the battle.

That’s all for now, the next post will do into technical detail on the battle system.

Trials of the Dolphin King is a game, developed by DIT students, for the Games Fleadh competition.

TotDK is a space trading sim, based off the universe of the popular series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The game follows a crew as they attempt to travel from earth to the restaurant at the end of the universe after their leader is declared the dolphin messiah.

On this blog, I will document the development of the turn based ship combat system.

Watch this space…