whoops, I let this thing fall off the first page!
Had a brief scare yesterday when I got a phone call from the local surgery saying they were sending my mother to hospital via ambulance because her breathing got bad again - but apprantly its nothing to worry about and they just want to observe her for a while, she appears to be spending most of her time grumbling that she has to be there
So anyway yeah i been working on the engine again. LUA is tightly knitted in now and i've been busy exposing a ton of usful functions that any would-be scripters might like. The rpg side of the game is actually becoming quite powerful, certainly much more powerful than I ever intended. At one point I almost forgot I was working on a card game O_O Need to make sure that I dont end up writing some turn based battle system whilst im half asleep and not really sure of who or where i am or what im doing
I could give screenshots but i wont yet as theres nothing really new to show. Everything that was working still is, I havnt heard back from the guy who mailed me about refurbishing my tilesets yet so that still looks the same and what not. So instead I guess I will give you my to-do list so you can guess at how close this is:
TO-DO:
expose lots more functions to lua (possiably needing to write some extra ones just for lua too - need to give scripters a chance to be creative)
add a very basic key-item inventory for the player (this is just so scripters can add a little more of the RP to the RPG aspect. beat someone, win an item to proove it, harder person is impressed and challenges you to a fight - open new area, etc)
leveling and points system - shouldnt be hard. win points for successfully beating an npc, certain amount of points let you level, spend points in shop on "goodies" - basically just two vars (nPoints and nLevel) and to develop a sensiable but not overly complex points awarding system for when you win a game
shop - i actually havnt written this yet. it will probably be one of the last things I do - its NOT hard to write at all but it could be akward to change if i do something drastic with decks or whatever in the future, thus i leave it until any said changes are complete.
editors - my new editing suite that i showed screenies of is currently working and what not, but not all the features etc are in yet. basically the editor is not as important as the engine is to me, i add features to the editor as i need them. however, for final release i obviously want everything done so this is on the to do list, but at the bottom.
add the rest of the rules to the actual triad engine. shouldnt be too complicated, i've been talking about it since like page 1 though - i just got caught up with the tileengine
add menu and profiles. not hard (though sometimes time consuming) but always ALWAYS the last thing I do when writing a game. some people get delusions of grandeur when they start writing games and for some reason they always write the intro and menu first. I guess because its generally the first thing you see when you play a game, but still - the amount of projects i've seen die which are basically just a menu is horrendous
its bad practice, do it last - it just slows down dev time when you have to go through a menu and itnro every time you want to test some changes you have made. and you can never be sure of all the options you'll want in the menu until the engine is finished!
thats it for items "to do" - i will probably find theres more as i knock that list down a bit, but thats all i foresee so far.
bug fixing.
im only aware of 2 bugs in the engine so far (oh yes, you can bet theres more, but i only found 2 so far):
1) the text is screwy in the message boxes, or the message boxes are. The message box is supposed to resize itself depending on text width, but its randomly off on some messages, pfft. Might end up changing to bitmap fonts anyway.
2) input is still dodgey from the gp2x buttons. I cant explain it - ironically stick input is perfect but the buttons are being really tempermental. It generally ALWAYS skips the first line of text in a message box and then requires you to press a button long and hard to register to move to next message x_X i would say thats a bug in the actual text boxes.. but it works fine on win32!! *mutters* ohwell, i'll sort it before long.
EDIT:
fair to point out, this is my engine and all code-based to-do list. half of actual game development time is actually creating the content for the engine, not just writing the engine. when all this is done i will need to do that content creation. I have 1 base card deck which is fine and i wont need many more tiles made. Users making cards is great - but i consider that to be "addons"
No, when the engine is done I will be creating and designing maps with my friend and writing scripts. As i have a decent rpg engine now I may as well give you some sort of pokemon-like story to play along to "gotta be the master, catch em all *wiggles eyebrows" >.>;
I will give you screenshots when I have something "new" to show
peace.
