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2006-11-20: Rapid Progress - Hardcrawler

I know I haven't been updating as often as I should. When I get all jazzed about a project I'd much rather write code than write about writing code. The decision to gut the networking from Hardcrawler was a good one. It didn't take much time, and it freed me up from a ton of headaches. Adding new client-side features no longer requires a laborious addition of networking code or paranoid consideration of the potential for hacked clients. Now I can freely add client functionality with the only slowdown being any bad decisions I may have made with my windowing code.

The decision to use Nethack for the rough game design was also a good one. Nethack has been in development for over 20 years, and there is a very rich set of gameplay ideas to pull from. Luckily, the interface design of Hardcrawler is so different from Nethack that even though I'm heavily borrowing from Nethack gameplay, the resulting game is actually quite a different experience.

A very interesting challenge has been getting in a lot of the complex Nethack features without making my interface as clusterfucked as Nethack's. I wanted to avoid requiring the player to memorize many many arcane keyboard commands, but still retain all of the complex item interactions; it has been difficult to do. I have made a couple of sacrifices, and so I have implemented one of these odd commands (dipping) as a different action cursor similar to the old C64 and PC adventure games. In a lot of those games, Quest for Glory comes to mind, you were able to change your cursor from a "get" cursor, to an "attack" cursor, to a "use" cursor etc.

The fundamental interface in Hardcrawler is still basically like Ultima Online. I have drag-and-drop style inventory management with double-clicking to use an item. 90% of the mechanics of the game use this paradigm. For attacking, I also use the UO style attcack cursor. The only odd mechanic I have is dipping. Dip may seem like a very odd action, but it is fundamental for a lot of different item interactions in Nethack, so it is the one place so far where I have violated my simple drag-and-drop and double-click mechanism for item interaction. You switch to the "dip" cursor which allows you to select an item to dip, and then a target to dip into.

There are a lot of Nethack behaviors that have been a challenge to implement intuitively. The entire religion and praying subsystem is an example. First, I want to make religion simple for the player to understand and use, and second I want as much of the religion logic as possible in Lua code. In Nethack itself, there is a pray command, as well as a sacrifice command. I didn't want to have to implement a whole new command for the user to memorize, so I introduced the concept of a religious "fetish" object that always exists in the starting player's inventory. Double clicking this item causes the player to pray, and all of the religion-specific state of the game is actually tracked through this item's Lua code. To sacrifice, the user double clicks on an altar entity in the game, which prompts them to select a target corpse.

So far I have succeeded in avoiding the addition of arcane keyboard commands, but it has been difficult. There are many many commands in nethack, and it has been a very interesting challenge to implement these complex behaviors only using the drag and drop/double click interface.

On a totally unrelated topic, I have had a blast using Blender to make 3D models of the myriad objects and monsters n Nethack. One of the advantages of everything ultimately getting rendered down to a maximum of 96x96 pixels is that I can be relatively sloppy with some of the details in Blender...Although the small size in itself is actually pretty challenging -- it can be difficult to even tell what something is when it's that small. In the screenshot you can see an ant model I made. I am now using my "dye" trick with my monsters, which allows one model to be a giant ant, a soldier and, and a fire ant depending on the r,g,b values in its entity file. This trick will go a long way in helping me implement a large chunk of the many many monsters in Nethack.

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