Makeii, just so you know, I officially hate you. I was feeling terrible about these already, and then that happened.

It's the sweet hat. I wish I had a sweet hat like that...

Oh uhm, actually the silver is his hair : [ the bandana tie in the back is a "blindfold" that goes over his eyes and nose to hide his face. His eyes don't glow like that, but the bandana makes it look like they do.

How can you be sooooooooo good at making icons and coding....XD

Day 3 (went to bed last night before I posted this...lol) -

Still tinkering with environment visuals. Game is designed as an ultimately pretty simple singleplayer "arcade" style game (with no fancy interface or control schemes; it may play entirely with only the directional keys), so the true "wow" factor has to come across in the presentation and glitz. And I feel that it is coming along in that regard very nicely (though still a long way to go before I reach my "vision" for it).

Day 3's focus was on setting up a simple parallax effect. It's still a work-in-progress, though.

This day also saw the very first steps towards adding in procedural terrain generation (there is just one map, and the game will play out in individual sessions, (or "runs"), so for maximum replayability, the map must change itself from run to run.

I was just mentally running through a TO DO list, and it was getting quite lengthy, so I've still got a long ways to go (no time to come up for air!). Thankfully the deadline is still more than a week away!

Well, that's how my Day 3 went.

Took me 30 min to hand make this god damn gif xD.
Sa team working hard : D

Today I constructed some soft-coded collision and translation for entities in scenes. It's CPU costly, but it should be useful if I partition collisions in a grid-like manner much like the native pixel movement.

This collision engine uses "vectors" instead of object placement. Rather, the reason why it is so costly is because it translates by moving one pixel at a time and re-checking appropriate sections before making another pixel movement. It's precise, but it needs to be optimized so that it won't give me some major issues if I have quite a few entities in one scene.

The hard part is done, though.

Ishuri wrote:

Day 4

Looks fantastic! Good job. Would be interesting if their profession attire was randomized so lumberjack [x] might look different compared to lumberjack [y]. Granted, it would only be for visuals unless you had some sort of progression system for your units.

Day 4 -

Ahh, Day 4. You were good to me.

Ironed out the parallax effect. It's not a full-screen sized background image or layers of images; it comes in the form of individual particles in the field of view (mostly in front of the player's depth) that need to be animate()'d to new pixel offset locations based on player movement (in 4 directions), so there were a few kinks to iron out. But it's now working about as great as I'm willing to spend time out of the limited time available to make it, so check that off The List!

Terrain generation is in and working great (just needs some fleshing out with added variety and decoration and such). I'm incredibly happy with how it works and looks for so simple of a system (it didn't need to be anything fancy like dungeon/room generation, so it was a relatively simple system to whip up, but it's very effective for what it needs to do!)

There was a particular terrain decorative item that needed to be animate()'d, and I had a vision of how it should look, and a general idea of the programming behind it, and I completely nailed it. It turned out literally exactly how I envisioned and planned it. That's not bragging, I'm saying that because it's something that happens almost never...lol It's ultimately such a trivial thing (no effect on gameplay; purely decorative), but I'm counting it as a huge victory...lol

The terrain gen adds a bit of overhead at world start. Running the game from Dream Seeker's "Run" command comes with a fairly lengthy delay before the world actually opens. I'm comfortable with that, but time permitting I'll look into shortening the delay, or adding a splash/title/loading/round start screen to land the player on while the world generates. Actually, the latter is likely necessary, anyways, as I'll need a "Game Over - Restart?" screen between runs (along with re-generating the map, so each run is slightly different) Well, I guess that solidifies another item for The List!

I also got some HUD work done (the most important element, a stat bar, is in and working), so that's definite progress. Now, I've got to work out a couple of other elements (there's really not much that needs to be displayed, just that main stat bar, perhaps a timer, maybe a score, and a simple maptext element for game output)

I also took leaps and bounds in brainstorming design ideas for mobs in the game. I can't wait to start creating them.

I just did a quick check, and out of the current total of 326 lines of code (though I tend to combine related instructions onto single lines using the ; operator, so this is not really a good number for total number of instructions) there are 16 calls to animate(), 25 instances of "transform", and 16 uses of "matrix". I'm leaving off their required documentation until the end.