So I'm moving TOMORROW and this is the last thing I'm doing before I put a million books into less than a million boxes. Because I'm not at all sure whether or not I'll have net access tomorrow night and yet I am sure that I'm not going to want to go into Manhattan just to make a Gruedorf post, here's a paranoid screenshot dump to preserve my magic 0.0% loss record. The goal is to preserve it all the way up to the release.
Let's start with a better version of the title screen from last time. Still needs a lot of improvement but it's not totally horrible anymore.
The Cass sprite is in the game now, although still not totally animated. This does show off the new textbox/menu graphics though which look infinitely better than the old ones (which I made by just googling "girly crap" and saving the first, pinkest image I could find at a low resolution. Stopgap measures are gr8)
This is one of the last big components of code left to write before the basic game systems are done. It's your XP system essentially: you pay out "BP" to up individual stats with a limit on how many times you can up stats per level. Actually going up a level involves like--doing shit for people, all Wizards and Warriors 3 style. (Doesn't really come into this part of the game a lot but I want to have the code in place.) Right now this thing completely doesn't work or look good, but hey, little progress bars!
Finally I can start laying out new maps, also. (I may have lost Tack forever, which isn't a massive deal but it'd still be a day of work or so to rebuild it.) This is an incredibly horrible and rough version of the desert, which is your first "overworld" type area. Here also is a new NPC to talk to, which is really nice since for the past week or two I've had to just disable old NPCs in the one map I had working in order to test code.
OH SHIT TEMPORARY CODE NOTIFYING US THAT ENEMIES MAY APPEAR LOOK OUT
QUICK QUICK SAVE UR GAME NOW
NOOOOO
Here is a battle with new enemy art by the talented and mysterious Xerxes Verdammt! This isn't so bad! We can cope with this, the easiest enemy in the game!
Oh. Different, more horrifying enemy art by XV. Sucks.
(n.b. I've loved that "It's a dead man's party!" joke ever since Silver Star Complete, but um I'm obviously going to change that)
What you can't see in the screenshots: the other new map, since I connected everything up and tested it, but then closed off the entrance until I finish building the desert. There's even less to see in the way of killr grafx than these screenshots, which are super ad hoc and lame. You also obviously can't see Long Dao's music, two more tracks of which are in the game now. That's four completed tracks; six more and that can be crossed off the list. I still have to take a day to hook up a microphone and knock it against interesting things around the home and then apply Audacity effects until I have a bunch of weird SFX for everything.
Oh, also, my pal told me that like--the page for my totally incomplete failed doomed 1999 Verge2 project, ZEPHYR, is still up... HERE. Thrill to vecna.chr and his FF6-edited-graphics friends! That textbox in the screenshots? It could open ten times for ten distinct lines of text before my shoddy handling of DMA caused my computer to crash! Verge2, hey! But seriously folks it was completely horrible to read the plot/characters sections of that page and to remember the time in my life when I thought stuff like that was like radical and awesome. I'm infinitely glad that like--I'm not stuck using a plot and characters that I came up with nine years ago.
So that's the update. It's not a great update honestly--I had hoped to have the BP manager and enemy spawning code finished by this time, since then I could say "Yo hey basic system code is finished, my doggs", but I can't really say that. The new maps still look stupid and there aren't really any more graphics by me and basically this week sucked with deadlines at work and preparations for moving (which I have to go do more of right now, agh.) The new menu is the biggest triumph I'll claim for myself this week since it looks way good and makes coding much faster since I can now pop stupid little "log" messages to myself (like the combat zone one) to let me know what tile I'm on, what the state of certain variables is, and other useful things. But I got the new menu done like--right after the last update pretty much, and since then I've done mostly jack shit.
And yet I'm still winning the gruedorf. Do you want to know how?
BECAUSE IT TAKES EXACTLY ONE HOUR A GODDAMNED WEEK.
ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS WORK ON YOUR GAME FOR ONE HOUR PER WEEK, AND TALK ABOUT THAT HOUR ON A BLOG.
ONE HOUR. SIXTY MINUTES.
That's it! Gotta go box shit up! See you all next week, I hope!
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