December 11th – December 17th

This is the first week for me developing the game. I’d probably put a lot of this progress on my enthusiastic outlook right now. But I’m taking care of all the background data related things to start.

What we have so far

If you haven’t read the About the Game section, please do! It details my up to date progress and the general idea I have for this game.

Data Structures! We’ve got a bunch and they’re all communicating properly at this point. The way I store all of the player information is what Game Maker calls ds_grids. If you have no experience with data structures, think of it like a battle ship game board. You can store data in every point on the board. So I’ve created a grid for weapons, armor, and the heroes themselves.

Drawing everything! I am not going to be too anal about my artistic talent but I do need to have images to display to know things are functioning properly. At this point I’d like the functionality to grab a hero in the “Tavern” and display that hero in the “Guild”. So I need images such as armors, faces, legs, hair, etc. And the hair and faces are gender specific. In the end I may wind up commissioning the art, but that is a 90% completion sort of thought. A note on the faces though – with the sprites being so small I wound up drawing the faces at double the size and just scaling them down to fit in the details. I may consider this method going forward for armor, accessories, and weapons. Here’s a gif up close and personal.

Images on images! I ran into a problem earlier this week where I didn’t even think about layering the armor beneath the right arm. So I had to redraw the arm – dark and light skinned to be able to draw that image separately over the character. Now it looks smooth, but I’m fairly certain it’s not efficient. Luckily there will only ever be 4 heroes on the screen drawing their layers at a time when in dungeons.

A pretty font. I went back to an old project and snagged some code to import a nicer font. Now it doesn’t visually bother me to look at info.

What’s Next

Tomorrow I will see what I can do with the Guild screen to be able to select heroes and gear them up. And just now I realized they also need individual inventories for items, so I’ll figure that out too. Those two things are sort of complicated tasks though so I will most likely wind up stretching that out all week. Also – I may draw up some more armors and weapons when I only have a bit of time.

Thanks for reading! Keep up with my Twitter for updates and be sure to check on the About The Game page for up to date info on what’s getting done!