This is the last of the daily screenshots for a while, just because I don't want to clutter the Gruedorf aggregator every day with minor updates. Rest assured that I'll still be working to the best of my ability/schedule every day, though. This will just give you a whole week to worry about what I'm doing, and how far you are falling behind. Fear is the heart of the Gruedorf, just as it is perhaps the heart of its primary participants.
If all goes well, I can have a first release ready probably at the start of September. The key is to resist the demo-birthing urge until the game is actually done. Since all told it'll be a pretty modest game--like two, three hours start to finish--I think I can manage this.
As far as yesterday went:
- I did make a new sprite, but not the dude in the hat--just the basic evil priest. Now the world is entirely populated with ciphers, teenage girls, and evil priests. It is much like the real world in this.
- The charge times work for a maximum of four party members, one enemy. The first release is probably just going to involve one enemy, even though it wouldn't be hugely complicated to involve more than that I guess. Fight also works pretty much as it'll eventually work, even if the damage calculation needs revising.
- Blackwood is basically laid out. Still need to make a bunch of "clutter" tiles, beds, empty glasses and such--one or two things a day and we'll be good.
- I worked out the plot scene by scene for the first maybe fifteen-twenty minutes. Stupidly though I decided that the first scene had to happen in the town rather than in this elaborate Blackwood map, so the next job is to lay out an entirely different map with different tiles. Then I can actually start, you know, making this into a game with story and things.
- Started reworking the font to be more like my comics handwriting (http://fictioncircus.com/mwhf). You can see the letter A in the screenshot (the rest of the font is just swiped obviously.) Also, I learned that Verge has a basic function called "EnableVariableWidth", which means I can stop frantically trying to design a function to enable variable width fonts. This is sort of like the time I realized there was a function called "SetEntitiesPaused", huh
- Overkill warned me about getting involved in his rivalry with SDHawk and Thrasher, so I guess all of them have to be my arch-enemies now. Backing down would be a craven act, more suitable to a low beast than a man. Clearly my manly pink textboxes will be the banner of victory in this match.
Goals for next week:
- Lay out Tack entirely and code at least those first fifteen minutes of story. Make some basic town tiles suitable to a horrible desert. Keep making "clutter" tiles for Blackwood as well, beds and beers being the most critical of these.
- New sprites: town guard, guy in the hat. Sheriff if time.
- Refine the battle system yet more: implement spell and item menus and make all of the basic battle commands work. Drop "Run" from the commands list (cowards!) Also make it so that MapInit always loads scene-appropriate battle backgrounds, even if I do love that Dragon Warrior thing.
- Finish the new font.
So: weekly now. See you all Saturday next.
4 comments:
Mini-updates in the comments from now on, yo. (I can't help it; a screenshot a day keeps me motivated.)
screen
Today:
- Finished the font, may revise it if I get sick of it
- Wrote out first draft of the opening sequence and designed tack.map.
- Scrapped the old tack.map, redid using new desert tiles--only like five tiles so far though. Just the BAD PART OF TOWN is done
- Invested in music from that musical genius, Long Dao--one song already in place.
Mini-update for 6/23 AM:
- oh, where do these terrible men go
- map spells test
Today:
- Put all of the opening sequence text into the .dat files.
- Made weird new tiles for tack.map--pretty much just the big adobe houses as yet. Still need to make the fences and the huge mountain. Also laid out the rest of the town with all obstructions/layers in place at least.
- Implemented a basic pointer for the map spells system, which is going to be the biggest pain to code over all. Doesn't do anything yet but fly around pointing at stuff
- Started actually putting together the opening sequence. Entities are pretty annoying and this is the last time I do some elaborate "night" filter that requires constant tending
Why do I work on this so much throughout the day? It's so stupid. I wrote out a release schedule to keep me honest/on track for early September, I hope. Also worked out the rest of the plot for the complete thing, on track for god knows when if ever. I highly recommend starting games without having any damn clue what the final plot will be.
Tomorrow let's see if I can finish that opening sequence, then it's just making sprites and tiles for the rest of the week (plus messing with the battle system, but that's not that hard now that all the basic stuff is done.) Then it's--victory
Actually, you can feel free to clog the aggregator with minor updates. It makes your competitors look worse! :D
I don't have any good screen shots for this one, mostly because I just realized that the way I coded the first story sequence (with the ColorFilter function) involved breaking my textbox. Not completely, but it doesn't render the entities properly anymore, since I had to make the textbox not update the screen--which somehow breaks my screenshots, I guess because of how Fraps captures screen data. So I'm going to have to write a secondary textbox function, one that's designed to take the current filter as a parameter and preserve it. Which is obnoxious! But I don't know what else to do with this, I guess.
I did finish the town guard sprite and gave some really, really hacked-up functionality to the battle commands--you can now permanently increase your defense by x2 every time you defend! This is obviously not the proper functionality at all and it's not that hard to fix. Magic and items are also going to be more of a pain than I thought--I can probably drop magic from the game altogether (since there's an alternate system already that I can just load all of the magic functionality into), but items are going to be irritating and I haven't really thought about implementing them whatsoever yet. I actually have the next two days off so hopefully I can get some more of this done--it's not going to be really hard, just sort of obnoxious and over-reliant on global variables.
Also, the Tack interiors are mostly laid out, but don't connect to the Tack exteriors really. Once I fix up the van Sauce house for company and make a real sprite for Cass I can finish coding most of that fifteen minutes of story.
Stupidly, I took two days off from this (not entirely by choice), and motivation just plummeted. I'm hoping that this comment and the little stuff I messed around with today will make tomorrow get easier. My advice to you, Gruedorf: keep doing this shit every day, at least an hour a day, or seriously pay the price.
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