Death and story

Not quite a week, but I've got pretty much everything done that I wanted to get done this week. Here are screen shots first:


That dirty bitch, Chocolate


Life is hard

I tried to take more screen shots, but for some reason my textbox function doesn't let Fraps take shots properly during cut scenes, so that one shot was done through horrible hacked-up PrintScreen means. I should really solve this problem somehow.

So, apropos of previous goals:

- Tack is laid out externally and all but about four houses internally. Most of those houses just have entities that say wacky things, plus the game's stores, which do no good since I haven't coded any kind of item or money system yet. Not that many "clutter" tiles, but a few more than I had before. I coded the first three story sequences of the game and a hacked-up title screen, so the game now has a big eight minutes of "gameplay" if you know where you're going. Most of that is watching characters yap at one another so I can't quite count it, but it's fun to see the story sort of come to life.
- Made a sprite for the town guard... and that's it!
- Battle system works much better in that you can get your ass kicked and see a "game over" screen now. I changed up the commands some, taking out "Run" and "Magic" and adding a few new character-specific commands. There's a little bit of cool strategy already--a VERY little bit, but it's not completely a button-mash affair. No new battle backgrounds, but the code is in place to load them once I make some.
- Font is done. Not sure how I feel about it, but there it is.
- Also worked on the map spells system. You can load a mouse cursor and click on stuff and nothing happens yet.
- Put in two songs from musical mastermind Long Dao.

So that's it for this week. Next week's goals?!

- All story in Tack done. Done! Get on with your lives!
- All layout in Tack done, and at least the inn/restore facility working because it's totally easy to do so. Game basically done, barring graphics/refinement, up to the point where you leave town.
- At least a sprite for Cass done, since he's a major character and stuff. I keep saying I'll do the man with the hat and I keep not doing it, so I'm not even going to say it this time.
- Map spells system basically done, barring some graphical refinement. You can click on things and have other things happen basically. This also involves setting up the menu so you can choose your active spell (should be only like two or three in this release so not that hard--the hard part is setting up the "hotspot" code.)
- Two more commands in the battle system: Items and Chocolate's "Knack." Make those work. I'm not even sure which will be harder at this point.
- Some headway on an items system. This will involve overhauling the menu system, long overdue.
- Any monster art that's done in the game and new monsters created to match it. It'd be a good idea to test a monster on the map coming up and messing with you as well, but I don't really care if this doesn't happen by next week.

I didn't quite get as much as I wanted done this week since I stupidly took a day or two off--really arbitrarily too. It completely kills your motivation when you don't work on something every day. Keep moving, keep plugging along