I’m getting really distressed at my overall lack of progress here. I mean, this week is one thing, since I spent much of it deep in the throes of caffeine withdrawal anyway, but it doesn’t seem like I’ve gotten any substantial progress done over the last month or so. There have been minor victories, like putting the finishing touches on the map editor, and incremental progress, as I get the collision detection closer and closer to where I want it to be, but none of the rapid sweeping changes I need to be making if I’m going to finish this project, like, ever. It feels like I fell out of my groove sometime a bit before Christmas and have yet to really settle back into a routine.
Well, I start caffeine again tomorrow. Hopefully that will help.
This week I basically worked on collision code until I was sick of it. After becoming sick of it, and feeling a bit too off my game to tackle the entity editor, I began developing the code for sound effects and music: This is still very much a work in progress, but having worked on it for the past few days I’m starting to get a feel for what I’m going to need to be able to do with my sound code and how to arrange it in order to achieve that.
Over the next week I’m going to finish up the sound components I began working on over the last few days, and then create the actual interfaces between those components and the gameplay code itself. It shouldn’t take too much work, in fact, to make entities emit sounds, with panning and volume appropriate to their position relative to the player character or camera. It shouldn’t even be too tricky to make entities able to play music tracks appropriately, once I lay the groundwork.
After that, I’ll probably be either tackling the entity editor, revising and adding to the set of animations, or polishing up the damn collision detection again, depending on my mood. Or, you know, maybe something else. We’ll see! Whatever I do, I shall do it augmented by a cup of coffee, or strong iced tea, or some kind of ludicrous neon energy drink. It will be fantastic.