except for the fact that it's not.

So I'm finally undertaking my little 'dream' I've had ever since I first realised just how much power you have in online gamemaking with BYOND. I'm making a Lufia game; and thanks to FFL's theory of "ONLINE VERSIONS OF OLD OFFLINE GAMES = COOL", I'm attempting to make an 'online counterpart' to Lufia and the Fortress of Doom. Some of you guys may have seen it, I host it on Unpublished occasionally to show my friends my progress..

Well, it's hard.

I've dabbed in DM code just a bit before, read a good deal of Dantom's good ol' DM guide, made some stickman games and mazes and whatnot. I've had a little peice of a game starring a cruddy looking Maxim icon for a long time, and I finally changed it a few months ago so that at least the icon (through two-tile mobs) looks normal. Well, my friend Stan (Uber Soldier--yes, wata's really a cool/normal guy if you get to know him) got Koujiryuu's old Lufia game code that he dropped, and decided to help me get started on my project for real. So we stayed up all night putting together the icons for all the classes and making a title screen and character select... And I was like, 'hey, this is gonna be awesome'. But then I get reminded that he had to leave for EUROPE FOR THE REST OF A SUMMER IN A DAY AND A HALF. So in those 36-or-so hours, when we weern't asleep, we were working. Stan's pretty decent at coding and he's made lots of little projects, so his help aided a /lot/ in getting the game started and showing me that, with enough work, I CAN make it into something. But he had to leave oh so soon, and I was left with a TON of game yet to be made and very little coding experience. Hey, I can make icons, rip turfs and map like a master, but when it comes to coding, I'd be lucky to pull off a simple calculator in Visual Basic in a week. But luckily, a couple of my friends, though they're fairly new to BYOND as a whole, have offered to help me, a girl I know's helping me with mapping, and an acquaintence of mine, Abu (key: MartialArtistAbu) is helping where he can--though with his wily attitude and trademark lazyness/lack of will he's only useful about one day a week. Oh well.

Currently I'm at a snag because I can't figure out how to make it so I can use .center to navigate past my title and character selection screens, but then /after/ the player is in the actual game, it becomes a macro for speak() or action() or interact() or whatever I end up naming that verb; like FFL, it will be used to talk to npc's, is the 'accept' button for menus etc, and is the general 'OK' button. When I set it as a macro, I can't get past my title screen, and... Ugh, this is probably a very dumb/easy problem that I'll look back at this blog post on later and just laugh at my newbish old self. But whatever.