Hints of gameplay

Tonight, I added the first hints of real gameplay to my game. When you click on a monster, you'll now bring up a quick view of that monster's statistics. In this case, we can see that the monster is called Skeldra (hooray for randomly-generated names!), he's at 21 of 40 health, and... well, some other gameplay stuff that may or may not matter, like wealth and attack and defense.

As a side note, being about two months into this project (admittedly only a few hours a week, but still) and only now adding the first bit of anything that looks like an actual game, that's a little sad. But at least it's in there now.

For anyone who knows D&D, the combat system is going to be a fairly basic D20 variant. For the rest of you... Well, there's a whole post waiting to be written on how the fighting's going to work. It'll be coming up soon.

There'll be a lot more detail on these guys, but most of it is likely to be hidden most of the time. This particular pane is intended to be basically a quick view so you don't have to open the full window all the time just to check on some basic stats.

Next up... Random name generation! "But wait," I hear you cry, "didn't you say mere moments ago that 'Skeldra' was a randomly-generated name?" Good catch, imaginary reader! I stole that name from a list of randomly-generated names I use for D&D. It's actually hard-coded right now, so every monster is automatically named Skeldra. Not so useful. I could start by simply having a hard-coded list of names and picking randomly from that -- I've seen some great games that do exactly that -- but being a nerd, I think I'm going to use a neat algorithm I found that produce reasonably realistic random names based on an initial data set; the nice thing there is that by simply providing a different data set, you can get different names. That lets me use the same basic mechanism for each of the monster types, while still giving each its own distinctive flavor.

When I get bored with random name generation (which may or may not be before I finish hooking it into the game) I'll probably move on to adding a dungeon entrance and spawning hero units. That's likely to show up in a week or two. And once I have hero units in the dungeon, with some monsters rolling around, well, the only logical next step is to start up some good old fashioned mayhem.