It takes a lot of little things to come together before you can start moving forward on the bigger stuff. Before I start working on quests for all maps I needed to get in more items into the game. Make sure no major issues when compiling the project for the first time. Finally, putting up a closed HTML5 draft on our Itch page for private bug testing.

Adding Items

There ended up being some successes and failures on this front. There will be around 100 or so items in this game. Many of them I have not worked out the finer details of just yet. It was however time to start building some of them out.

The first part was thinking about the overall game design in how I wanted items to be and the distribution of those items in the game. There are 10 maps in total in the game with one of them being a town.

By default 001 Game Creator has for the character a slot for a chest, helm, 1 accessory, shield, and a weapon. Since the whole point of trying out this engine was not to go far out of my way trying to rework a lot of what it comes with this seemed like a decent base of items, I would need as far as gear for the player.

There are also base stats for health, mana, attack, defense, agility, and wisdom. I could try digging into things and seeing about adding different kinds of stats. The more stats you need to a game the more complex it becomes for the player and yourself in creating it. Sometimes it’s just nice to keep things simple and that should be more than enough for my needs.

The next step was to create the items in the game. To get things started I worked out a bunch of different names and had a bunch of item icons to import in. I would need to do further work in the future once I worked out exact stats. For the time being, I just need the items in I can add stats and other information later on.

In a more powerful game engine, I would just be importing an excel sheet with everything formatted correctly. That however is not how this was going to go. Perhaps there is a way to go about it. If there was I missed the way to go about doing that.

Instead, I had to go into the items and magic menu and create each item. I’m rather glad I’m only planning around 100 or so items. To make life a bit easier I made a bunch of folders to help separate different pieces of gear. That way I could just go in and work on all chest pieces or all weapons. At some point, I'll reorganize each map.

I also needed to work out some other details. One thing I failed at doing was seeing how I could get the item to show up on the character. I expected it to not be a success. I was hoping I could upload the armor icons and create separate animations that would just not be moving and they would show up. That did not work at all. There is another way to go about it but I saved going that route for another day.

I then set up a test little test area to at making sure that item meshes were showing up. Along with making sure you could see the items in inventory. Some of the icons I have to appear to work great while others I’ll need to swap out. I learned to move forward at doing things on a larger scale.

There was also a smoothing option you could select for each image you uploaded when it comes to items. With how jagged they were appearing on the ground I decided I preferred the look of it being enabled.

There is still a lot more work and things I need to learn before the items and drops for the game are where I want them to be. Such as having monsters drop items. You can add an item to a monster for it to drop. It will always however drop that item. I need to look more into how data tables and adding them to monster triggers works for the 001 Game Creator engine.

Compiling The Project

Before I get things too far along I needed to do my first compile of the project. It would suck to put heavy amounts of time into this only to discover there was some massive issue trying to compile the project and I needed to redo a lot of work.

Since I’ve complied games in other engines before I was expecting this to be a giant pain in the behind. That ended up not being the case. With how small this game is it took less than 30 seconds before I had an 86 MB HTML file to upload to a site.

The only possible issue that I could see was being warned about some possible issues without going out and getting some extra files on my own for different web browsers. Since I’m not entirely sure if Itch takes care of any issues even after testing I still need to do some further research.

While the end goal of this project was to have it be HTML5. If that ends up being too much of an issue I’ll just go with it being a download. I will however put in some effort first before going that route first.

Uploading And Closed Testing on Itch

The final part was to upload and see how things worked. With how small the file size is I ended up doing a couple of cycles of testing, attempting to fix, re-upload, and further testing. Since these issues were not happening during testing within the game engine but after I put them up on Itch it will be a bit harder to try and resolve the issues.

I set up a draft page that is private for now. I have generated private links for some early testers. It will remain as a draft for a little longer till I work out some of the bigger bugs. There were also some options I had to configure for the game.

The first biggest issue I ran into was mapping taking forever to load or just being stuck. I ended up doubling the amount of ram the game will use to 512 MB which helped out a lot. Since I have not played other games on Itch like this in their browser I was rather a happy thing improved after making this change and it was not super slow on their end kind of issue.

One issue that is going to be harder to resolve and I still need to work out is the game crashing when completing quests from the second NPC. Oddly enough the second NPC other than one added event was purely using the base templet with only changing some values of the events.

The NPC I made a lot of changes and added events to that handle a few quests works without any issues. I was rather expecting him if there were going to be issued to be the trouble maker. At least I’m not trying to troubleshoot him with how much is going on.

There were some UI issues. Since I did not play around with anything involving that I can only assume it could be an issue with the browsers I was testing with or using it on Itch. When I looked into it it seemed there were some people in the 001 Game Creator community using Itch. So I’m not sure yet how I’m going to approach trying to resolve this issue.

There were also some annoyances and some keyboard settings I need to change for the game. When playing in full screen on Itch if you press Esc it puts you back into windowed mode. By default 001 Game Creator uses ESC to open the window for inventory and a few other things. That I’ll need to change in some way or another.

There was also an issue with getting killed. As you can see my character is dead and yet no death screen. That was not an issue I ever had while playtesting within the engine itself.

Always interesting the bugs you run into when testing something in the actual environment it’s going to run in. I ran out of time before the holidays to fix this but in my next testing round, I hope some further scripting I’ve added has resolved this issue.

Final Thoughts

It would have been nice if everything just worked. I was not expecting it to and that has never been how game development is. That is why it was important to test on the site I’m going to use before I work on things like questing for all the other maps. Hopefully, I can nail down my issues and start moving forward before the end of the week.

If all goes well perhaps the next post will include an early testing link to the project. For those following along to see it for themselves and to try it out on Itch in the browser.

Other Content

• More Maps
• Maps Part 3
• Play Testing And Quest Scripting

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by our main developer. This post can be originally found on his blog here.