Dev Blog #1

Wednesday May 15, 2013

Matt and I are off to a great start. Over the spring break Matt began working on a level editor that we can use to quickly and accurately create maps that have the correct data we need for the game to run. It is almost done, he just needs to implement the export function that will write the data to a text file and will allow us to read in that text file into game data.

I worked this week on adding in functionality to the player and monster classes that allow for leveling up and experience gaining. This is really not as hard as it sounds. It was merely adding in a few variables in both classes, their respective setters and getters and some other functions that are either for debug purposes or that give us added features that may or may not stay in the final build. I have to focus next on re-writing the entire battle system to move the damage calculations into the monster and player classes. This will allow us direct access to the stats of each entity without needing multiple functions calls if we keep it in the battle state. I also need to implement the experience gaining system for when the player defeats an enemy. Matt is going to work on getting items to randomly drop from defeated enemies. A message box will pop up saying something like "Entity dropped an item! Would you like to take it with you?" and the player will be able to select yes or no. That statement is generic and will contain specific elements like the enemy's name and the name of the item that was dropped. We figured that this way was much easier to accomplish than actually having an item drop on the ground and be visible to the player. It is less coding and a lot of games do it this way.