Development Blog #6

Saturday, April 20, 2013

So here we are, down to the wire on this project. The Alpha build presentation is coming up on Wednesday and the game is shaping up to be something really neat. Matt and I are both very proud of the fact that we wrote an entire game engine from scratch that is mostly non-game specific. It could be applied to any other game we wanted to write, with minor changes.

The final things we are taking care of are implementing the shop feature for the city level (we already have the merchant drawn on the screen, just need the functionality), drawing the enemy on the battle screen (we already have the player drawn), allowing the player to move between the city and the forest level and implementing interaction between the bear enemy and the player in the forest level that will initiate a battle. These are all very easy to implement and will take minimal code to accomplish. I want to take this time to thank Matt for all of the work he did with the heavy graphics portion of this project. I am not a graphics genius by any means, and he made something so simple and easy to use. I look forward to completing this project next session with him.

Looking forward, Matt is going to write a level editor over our spring break which will allow us to quickly create levels for the game (as for now the are hard coded into the game itself). This will spit out a text file with symbols in it, which will then be read in by the file i/o system we have in place. The symbols will correspond to a specific tile, and that tile will then be drawn on screen. We also want to add in small touches to different aspects of the game, like animations during battle so you can see both the player and enemy attacking. We also want to implement the team feature we designed in the early stages of development which would allow the player to have a team of animals and people to help them fight their way to the end of the game. I may or may not post something here for download that you would be able to test out and see what we have. That might come at the end of next session, when the game is fully developed.