It feels like it’s been a little while since my last update, so I wanted to take a moment to bring everyone up to speed on what has been happening behind the scenes.
The past couple of weeks have been busy on the academic and work front. I recently submitted my research paper on Spark Cluster Computing and Working Sets, and I’ve now begun work on my semester project in my Machine Learning course. Between research, coding, and the usual whirlwind of graduate school, things have been moving quickly.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, I also celebrated my birthday and took a few days to unplug at the cottage in the woods. It was a welcome break from the screens and keyboards. The wildlife was out in full force, and I even got to watch two red foxes playing in the clearing nearby — one of those rare moments where you remember to slow down and enjoy the quiet.
Of course, even during busy weeks, the forge never truly goes cold.
Over the past few evenings I’ve started building the next major component of the Forge42Engine: multi-player character battles.
Right now, our alpha testers have been running battles with a single player character. That has been great for validating the core combat engine, but to unlock more advanced mechanics like ranged combat, spellcasting, and party tactics, the engine needs to support multiple PCs in the same encounter.
After several late nights fueled by black coffee and stubborn persistence, I’m happy to report that multi-PC battle support was pushed into testing last night.
For the moment, “testing” means the classic developer method:
me aggressively beating the API with Postman until it confesses any bugs.
So far, the system is holding up well:
- Experience points are being distributed correctly across the party
- The alpha testing gold bonus system survived the transition
- Combat flow remains stable with multiple participants
Even better, our friendly bard narrator Alistair is already doing a solid job weaving the multi-player combat narration together. There are still a few rough edges to clean up — particularly around monster naming conventions — but overall the results are promising.
Looking ahead to next week’s Spring Break, I’m hoping to carve out a few extra development sessions to:
- Build the new WordPress UI for multi-player combat
- Move multi-player battles fully into Alpha testing
- Design and implement a party formation system
The party system will become increasingly important as the combat mechanics expand. Once ranged combat and magic are fully implemented, party structure will matter. Players will be able to organize their party strategically — tanks on the front line, archers in the second rank, and spellcasters safely in the rear.
There’s still plenty of work ahead, but the engine is steadily evolving into the tactical combat system I originally envisioned.
More updates soon – Babble Baz