I’ve been away from the game for a few weeks due to my personal life being really busy lately but I’ve been thinking about the game and now it’s time to pick back up on development.  Here’s some things I’ve been pondering, in no particular order.

1. I need to rebuild my world editor.  The world editor mostly works right now but it’s gotten big enough that it’s difficult to maintain because I didn’t really plan it out from the start.  THREE.js actually has a somewhat nifty editor already built so I will probably take that editor and start adding in feature I specifically need to create zones for Lyridia.
2. The game engine needs its own project.  I’ve been making the game engine alongside the game and so far that’s worked but over the last few months it’s gotten unwieldy.  It’s just hard to organize well when you don’t have a clear separation of “engine” from “game created with engine.”  I have also created a very basic workflow that might make professional software engineers cringe, but the gist of it is that I have a file that lists every file in the engine project.  A Node script copies all of those files into a single file, then another node script minifies the whole thing.  This gives me a single Javascript file to load and also reduces the file size pretty drastically.  I realize there are more robust ways of accomplishing this but this way works for me and doesn’t require me to rewrite the whole code base to work properly with Node.  For now I’m calling the game engine “OK.”  Because, let’s face it, it’s not great but it’s OK.
3. I’ve been thinking about character classes for the game.  For a long time I’ve had this idea that character classes should progress as a character gains more experience.  For instance, a fighter type may start off as a general tough guy at level 1, but by the time a character is at end game he should be something more specific and impressive like a gladiator or a commando.  It has never made sense to me for a level 1 character to be the same class as a level 100 character.  A level 100 character shouldn’t be just a “fighter” and a level 1 character shouldn’t be a “death knight.”  So my thought is that set points in a character’s development the player should choose how to progress.  For instance, for Warrior types every character starts at level 1 as a “Tough.”  This is just a basic low-level fighter.  But at level 10 the player would choose whether to focus more on attack or defense and become either a “Fighter” or a “Defender.”  Then at level 20 you can become a “Warrior,” a “Brawler,” or a “Guardian.”  This carries on until level cap.  The only refinement I might make to this is to give every archetype it’s own progression chart.  So instead of a Warrior type choosing between DPS and tanking, I might make Warriors choose between targeted DPS and AoE DPS, then have a progression chart for Tanks where characters can be more agile or withstand more damage.  In any case, I like the idea of being able to play multiple different classes during the life of a character, and even getting to plan out skills and playstyle based on the path a character takes through the progression chart.

That’s enough planning and thinking for now.  I need to go actually do some work on the game.