Game Week - Dungeon Master
Entry posted by Rick ·
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Thought I'd share my experience like Aggror did.
First I'd like to say that it's a bummer that only 11 people voted so far. It's not a very big sample size and I hope many more will vote in the next day. I'm open to leaving the poll open for longer to let more people try the games available. Maybe over the weekend or so as people might have more time then.
I'm also bummed out that only Aggror and myself have exe's to try. Was hoping for a better turnout and if he and I win it's a little awkward since we were providing the Steam prices.
Physics
I'm with Aggror on this one. There is for sure something wrong with the Physics. Everything about my game ran very slow for me. It was very frustrating to test the game each time with the poor physics performance. This needs to be looked at. There is no way I should be getting -20 fps on my little game where if I did the same in LE 2 I was getting 100+.
Scripting
I used pure Lua for my game and I'd say it was a love hate relationship. I loved already having the structure of entity scripts and the flowgraph integration, but there were many bugs that were very frustrating. As Aggror pointed out if you work in Lua enough in the game engine you'll eventually see that the script tab will show other script properties than what you know it should have. I would also create scripts by right clicking in the Scripts folder and using the menu and I noticed if I made more than a couple scripts that way it would end up overwriting the filename of the previous script instead of the newly created file. Very frustrating and would force me to just go into the file system and fix things that way.
That being said, I love working with the flowgraph. I used a couple scripts I placed in the Assets section a few months ago without issue. I connected my scene loaded script to my sound script to start the creepy music you hear at the start. When a frostball collides with the fire, the fire triggers an onPutOut event that I hooked up to the fire particles to stop playing the emitter, hooked up to the smoke emitter to play it, and to the key model to enable it to be picked up. I wanted to play a sizzle sound like the fire was being put out, but I couldn't find the sound effect, but it would have taken about 15 seconds to set that up.
What I disliked about the flowgraph is when I modify the scripts that are exposed to the flowgraph the connections are removed. Very frustrating as I'd forget this after making a change, run the game only to notice nothing happening. I had a fairly simple flowgraph but my scene was also very small. Even with a normal size level the flowgraph could get somewhat big, and remember what was connected to what would be very frustrating. This has to be fixed to be considered usable in any real game.
Security
Since I used purchased models I had to password protect them. Seems I was the first to give this a try in Leadwerks 3. I'll say that it leaves something to be desired when you need to package the game up. I had to manually make zip files from the folders in the base directory. You can't include the base folders, but only the stuff inside of it. You then name the zip file the same as the folder. However, the editor will not read zip files, so for development you need your normal folders then you have to do this zip method. I moved the base folders out and left the zip files hoping to make an install package that would include the zip files, but no such luck on my part which is why the game is in a rar file instead of an installer. A more user friendly approach would be either to have the engine read password protected zip files, or to have the publish option zip/password protect the base folders automatically for us and only place in the package so that your development environment stays untouched. Because I opened the project without the base folders and just the zip files, and I promise you I didn't save anything once I saw that it didn't work right, the project seems to be corrupt now. I'll spend some more time this weekend trying to get it to work as I'd like to expand on the game.
Overall
Like others I didn't have as much time as I wanted. What you see with my game is probably 8-10 hours of work where a good deal was spent on learning the physics of opening the door (which sometimes crashes still. would be nice to have PhysicsMove() function for stuff like this) and the particle editor (as it seemed I needed to modify the text mat file with a property that isn't in the material editor. how was I supposed to know that 
). I had much more planned that included enemies that had some strategy in killing, and 1 more bigger puzzle. However, the ability to create the gameplay interactions to give the game some life was really easy and efficient. For anything physics based though I think LE 3 has a little ways to go yet, and I hope the performance can be worked out.
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