I’m doing a terrible job of getting these out on-schedule. I think I keep wanting to have some solid progress to show before each update, so on weeks where I’m a bit behind I tend to procrastinate on the devblogs until I make that progress. And, of course, each time I do that the time I have to make more progress before the next scheduled update shrinks a bit more. It’s not a great habit.
Anyhoo, the facet selector is pretty much done now.
It’s the purple thing at the bottom, above the distance filter slider. Not too fancy, but then it doesn’t have to be. There’s only one facet here, but the button to the right (not implemented yet but should be easy) will add additional facets as needed. The little tabs underneath each open a browser for their respective asset type (bitmap, animation, or graphics data), with the last just changing it to a plain pixel render. I may change some of the specifics of the layout here, and there still some work to be done in terms of making it all work right, but it’s only a couple of days away from being done I think, which will… pretty close to finish the detail editor, unless there’s something I’m forgetting.
I think wrapping up the core programming of the game is finally a goal that’s within sight. So what remains to be done?
- inter-enemy and attack collision detection is probably the biggest one. Once I get that done I can start making test enemies to tune the gameplay. This will also include destructable walls and moving platforms as particularly important and, perhaps, tricky manifestations of the problem.
- Collision detection still needs improvement. It’s largely where it needs to be, but still gets a little glitchy around the corners, especially on steep slopes
- All the programming for the sling attack, which will require some additions to the Animation class to enable the procedural effects I envision to tie into the standard animations
- Saving/loading game progress
- Displaying dialogue subtitles and other text info on-screen, syncing it up to what’s going on sound-wise.
There’s probably more I’m forgetting, but I’m definitely feeling like there’s a lot more programming behind me than there is left ahead of me on this project. Once I get the above tasks nailed down, most programming is going to be a matter of solving particular problems that come up and less of building architecture to run the game. In other words, the kind of programming that’s generally a lot more fun and interesting.
I’ll probably try to write up a more complete version of the above list so I have a better idea of where I stand, and try to think of any weird outliers that I should account for before I put my seal of approval on the code base as it stands, but… yeah. I’m kind of excited that, even if things are moving more slowly than I would have hoped, they are moving. Maybe it took me a year and change to build this game’s basic skeleton, but I built it, and only a few finger-bones are left before it’s ready to do the heavy lifting.