Ethereal Darkness Interactive (EDIGames)

08/21/2020

While this probably isn't news to anyone, not much has been happening around EDIGames of late. This update serves as an official statement that we are going into hibernation indefinitely.

We are hesitant to say 'shutting down' as almost assuredly, at points in the future we will release new games when the inspiration strikes.

We would like to take this opportunity to say thank you, to all of the fans, supporters, testers, customers, and critics alike.

Thank you all for being a part of our endeavor to make our vision a reality.

08/28/2019

05/06/2019

I need one of these at home

02/07/2019

With the recent addition of the map tiles mechanic, it is time to push forward on new features that dovetail with it.

Notably I will start implementing basic character stats, specifically the all important stamina value which is more or less the throttle of game progression, as it controls some aspects outright, like revealing new tiles, and thus locations; but it also controls your effectiveness at foraging.

So not unlike real life if you're worn down, it has effects on all you do. The goal is to keep a high stamina level at the same time spending it wisely.

Sleeping is of course a great way to recover stamina, but it imposes food and water penalties, not unlike life you wake hungry and thirsty.

Managing this survival balance will come in the form of discovering new locations with increased, varied and improved sources of food and water, as well as finding, and creating tools that increase your effectiveness.

While this makes up the core gameplay loop, the game is a graphic adventure, so as you progress the story will unfold and there will be challenges to solve, depending on how deep you want to venture in understanding the significance of the island you've found yourself stranded on.

What games do you feel implemented survival concepts well? I'd livey to hear in the comments.

02/06/2019

Still quite a work in progress, but the hex fog of war is shaping up nicely.

02/05/2019

The new overland map fog of war system is going well. I've implemented a sparse array of hex tiles, which start by obscuring the landmass. The tiles are uncovered one by one spending stamina to do so, and only tiles adjacent to at least one other cleared tile may be cleared.

Eventually a Oregon trail/rougelike feature will accompany the clearing if a tile resulting in positive and negative resource/stat outcomes.

In addition some tiles would reveal locations on the island you can visit, and this feature, that is integrating it with the existing system to travel to rooms was giving me trouble.

My first thought was that when a travel tile was uncovered, it wouldn't hide but rather change icon and become the travel button for that room. However expressing that additional data in the static hex data ballooned the size and complexity of all hexes, even though only maybe 10% would be travel tiles

It began to taste like the familiar flavor of trying to cram too many responsibilities into a single feature.

And was complicated by the fact that static data was involved where elementary sizes must be consistent for the initializer lists, that is I couldn't subclass my way out of this (not that inheritance is usually a first-best solution anyway).

To make matters more complex I already have a robust travel system for icons on the map handing traveling to rooms and there state of knowledge and visits.

After some thinking I realized that I should user the systems together. Keep the hex tiles simple did blocking, eating stamina, hiding, and rougelike rewards.
.. But after a tile hides check it's tile location against the existing room travel maker locations, and if one matches use the existing functions to reveal that room marker.

This joins the systems together by incidental tile coords, it might seem inelegant, but no matter so than a relationship database join by I'd.
..and the separation of the systems reduces complexity all around!

02/02/2019

When you need those esoteric hex tile routines.
A but dusty but relevant as ever!

02/01/2019

In my game, travel is mostly done point to point from one known location to another. This is a bit of a departure from how it was done in 96mill where locations were mostly adjacent, though changes in direction clearly left some players disoriented.

In the new game locations are even more sparse, and this means that to go to a place, a known marker must exist for it, however the game is about exploration, and not every marker can be gleaned by notes or cave paintings etc.

So I will take a bit of a page from the original fallout, where the overland maps start as a 'fog of war' probably hexagonal, and indicate a cost to stamina etc. Or denote special equipment to travel there and clear a cell potentially discovering a new marker.

This should allow me to throttle discovery bit and actually add some meat to the mechanics of getting around, it also means I can reserve finding some locations by notes etc to rare and believable scenarios.

P.S. Ernest Pazera would likely approve of my use of hexes. Time to dust off my copy of isometric game programming in DX 7

02/01/2019

For I finally got something different 😂

01/31/2019

Something that has vexed me ever since I first experienced it is the flow that forms when you are implementing game content, that is, placing objects, writing code for interactions, npc dialogue, etc.
..and you realize you need an asset, image, sound effect etc. that you don't have, or it would take time to find in your stock library --or worse make.

This breaks flow, and in the case of scripting npc scenes consistency in that flow is super important, if you've managed to put yourself into the proper tone for a character or scene.

In the past with this happens, especially in the case of sound effects, I will instead leave comment and come back later to fill in the sfx, often times much later, sadly sound design often gets pushed off until very best release.

So I am going to try a different approach, when I come across these cases of needed resources, I will stub in temp ones, though named accurately, then the process of replacing these shouldn't involve modify script code (potentially creating bugs) but more of a file replacement process ... We'll see how that goes.

01/29/2019

Dipping into the sapling , thanks !

01/28/2019

An exciting and fruitful weekend!

For the majority of my life I have shyed away from pre-compiled headers, mostly from a lack of understanding and not much need. However with my compilation times growing, a need for compiling more often, and increased use of the standard library (whose templates after said to be large culprits of compilation speed issues) it was time to investigate them.

I'll admit the process was a bit strange, I am used to including only what is needed in .h files, pre-declaring where possible, and ideally including in the .cpp file instead.

With pch you make a single .h file, say pre-compiled.h and within it include all the common ideally unchanging headers you use, strong, vectors, list, libraries, etc.

You then include that file first in your .cpp files, and not in the .h files.

Modify your make file to compile the header like any other source file, but make it's output precompile.h.gch
and makes it live next to the header file, now when you next compile your program it will see and use your pch instead of compiling the header.

In my case I was able to drop my build times from 29s to 8s quite an improvement!