Reply To: [unofficial weekender] Last Friday of February…

[blinky465 17028xp 1]

I finally feel like I had a breakthrough with my game/app thing today. I made a game – playable and everything – but then building on it (for a new scenario, or to introduce a new location or something) was a real pain in the backside. So I’ve been battling for weeks building my own game-world-designer web-based interface thing that could post values to a database, which I could then read back and use to create 3d objects in a Unity app.

I love writing games and coding and solving problems. One thing I really *don’t* like is  coming up with repetitive tedious tasks like placing walls and floortiles – let along then writing tonnes of code to interpret my own stupid file formats into something useful.

And the other night I had a bit of an epiphany: I use Inkscape to sketch out my simple dungeon layouts:

and I use the description field to record any extra bits and bobs of information I might find useful. So I figured, why not write a parser that can read an .svg file, and create the “game world” directly from it? So I did.

The whole thing took just over a day to code up and I reckon from now on I’m going to design *every game* in Inkscape! Which means I can get on with the fun stuff like adding art and tokens and characters and things. The final game will be entirely top down – and even with just a single tile prepared, already is starting to look the business:

Yes, it’s a Space Hulk variant. But that’s only because I can build an entire map using just a few simple, repeating, tile shapes. My full-on cyberpunk city-based RPG is still in development. But – just like priming and dipping a couple of Space Marines for a “quick win” – I’m doing this just to prove that the game engine works, and to get something (anything) finished and tabletop ready!