The Ebonheim Chronicle

A big part of the elevator pitch for Chronicles is Nethack with Into the Breach-inspired combat. As it turns out it can be really hard to message out to a player what is happening in combat when you have no pixels and no colors!!!

There's just 8 million tiny tweaks and details to make these gifs happen and I'm really happy with them.

#gamedev #chron4

| 🌐 | 🙋‍ | @britown@blog.brianna.town

Feels like I hardly got to touch this over the weekend but did manage to squeeze in the basic system for actor turn-order as well as input-controller player character, camera following, and just the quickest dirtiest A* I've ever cobbled together.

Edit: Also wanted to show off some of the palettes I've been putting together as I try to wrangle standards for palette colors so that UI will still work.

#gamedev #chron4

| 🌐 | 🙋‍ | @britown@blog.brianna.town

#gamedev #chron4 #pixelart

| 🌐 | 🙋‍ | @britown@blog.brianna.town

Feeling burned out on code this week so took a step back to use all the new tools and try to generate some assets. I get overwhelmed with pixel art but 14x14 tiles with 16 colors is comfortable enough that I can be happy with the aesthetic.

#gamedev #chron4 #pixelart

| 🌐 | 🙋‍ | @britown@blog.brianna.town

I've always had this pipe dream of being able to live-edit all assets in a game project while the game is running and I'm feeling really strong about the progress of this newest project!

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Most/all of my personal side-project revolve around C/C++ desktop apps with homespun engines. It's usually as much a journeyman effort for learning more CS as it is a desire to make a game. A big part of solving the issue of finishing a game has to do with having good architecture with a good assets pipeline.

In this example we have:

• The assets data-catalog is on the top left
• A running game instance in the top right (can have multiple running in windows independently in the same exe)
• A tile schema editor for map tiles in the bottom left
• A homemade pixel image editor in the bottom right.

Any pixel edits to the graphics in the editor live-update anywhere they are used (in this case both the running game and the schema editor) giving you redundancy to test your edits. It also has perfect referential integrity so you never have to worry about your game crashing when an assert comes up missing.

I will have to come up with some thoughtful posts digging into the how's and why's of all of this but the main concepts at play here are:

• “C-Style” C++
• Generated reflection code from struct definitions
• Generic recursive file format
• Live++
• Dear ImGui

#gamedev #chron4 #cpp #imgui

| 🌐 | 🙋‍ | @britown@blog.brianna.town