As I near the official beta release of Rising Legends, I decided to take some time off from programming and focus on the design and balancing that is so critical to games. Often times you’ll find classes that are just too powerful, or stat dependencies that don’t really make any sense, but these traps can be avoided. I decided that taking some time off from programming would give me a chance to plan things out a little more.
I’ve been working on a design document that outlines the game as I finish things up. It’s slow going, but every time I finish a small section of it, I get almost the same thrill as finishing the same section programmatically. I guess I know that when this piece is completely done, I’ll have a much easier time finishing up the beta release and porting everything over from the bland black/white layout to something that is much for fitting for an RPG.
From the beginning I wanted browser-based games to contain features that make other MMO’s so easy to get in to. Not as much page refreshes, modular windows, beautiful graphics and proper fight timers are just some of the things I opted to include in Rising Legends. As well, I worked a long time on the UI, ensuring ease of use, so first time players can just jump right now. From the programming side of view, I had to take some time out to implement my own version of the JQuery Tools tooltip and overlay libraries to ensure speedy load times. While JQuery Tools provides some great animations, I found that not only were they too flashy, but they lagged. The more tabs you had open, the slower it went. While my interpretation of it isn’t nearly as flashy, it cuts down on a lot of the code cutting out about 6KB of things that I didn’t need. While 6KB doesn’t seem like a lot, since network speeds are now our bottleneck instead of processing power, it will start to add up as more players join up.
I figure I will add a brief explanation of a basic version of the overly code, since it is an interesting topic and very easy to implement. As well, it allows for perfect positioning of elements.
In closing, I just wanted to link you all to an in-dev version of the UI that will be pushed out with the beta release: http://boba.feethavebeen.com/template1/
