It's prototype hand in day today. Fortunately I just finished the last thing I wanted for the prototype. Huzzah. It only took me 6 hours to do. Progress since last week:
- Working inventory screen. Clicking on an item in the inventory "equips" it if it is an equippable item. By that I mean it moves it to the inventory slot that's away from everything else/position 0 in the inventory array, it doesn't actually affect gameplay yet. However, it shouldn't be very difficult to get the game checking the statistics of the item in array position 0 and setting damage and attack type.
- When an NPC is killed it now drops an item. These dropped items can be picked up if the player walks over them, and then appear in the player's inventory.
- Levelling up now works to a limited degree. Killing an NPC rewards the player with experience points, once the experience reach a threshold level the player's level increases. This currently only increases the player's maximum health and the experience threshold. Again it shouldn't be difficult to get this working as fully intended.
- Simple character sheet working. Shows player's current health/max health, strength, toughness, dexterity and experience points/xp threshold. Doesn't need to do much more for now, will probably end up showing more detailed stats once they exist.
- Very simple quest generation. It currently only generates simple fetch quests. An "outpost" is generated that contains a blue gem type thing, pick up this gem and return it to the port town on the North Island to complete the quest. When the player completes the quest, they are awarded with 200xp and a new quest is generated. The new quest is exactly the same thing, just with the outpost in a different place. The code for this is really bloody sloppy and not working entirely as I'd like behind the scenes, but it's getting the job done. With a bit of cleaning up though, it should be adaptable to further types of quests. The important thing currently though is: IT BLOODY WORKS!
- Interface works. Buttons take you to the correct screens (even if the menu screen and questlog screens are just blank). Nice little windows-esque X button in the corner closes whatever screen you're on. The buttons under the health bar stay highlit to tell you which screen you're on.
- Drew a few nice little graphics for the items and interface. That's all going to need to be reworked to be more efficient though. The item graphics aren't even in a tileset!
- The lovely Mark Robinson supplied me with some overworld music which I implemented right away. It loops really badly (completely my fault) and skips when it first starts but it's there, dammit. Nice little piece of music, reminds me of some music from StarWing. I'm on to you, Lips.
- Drew up my fictional games development company's logo and made a splash screen that shows when the game is started. It fades out crudely after a while, but can be skipped.
- Drew up my fictional games development company's logo and made a splash screen that shows when the game is started. It fades out crudely after a while, but can be skipped.
I think that's about all I got done this week. It looks like a lot but it was actually a slow and pretty lazy week, I've had to stay up pretty late on days I did work to get the necessary work done (hence why I'm posting this at near enough 6am).
For the next week and a bit it's a matter of making things work and look a bit nicer, as I'm to be presenting my game to loads of people at the Game Cultures Christmas show on the 15th. That should be trouser browningly terrifying. First up for a polish: Quest generation. It's currently a complete mess backstage, and not particularly impressive or even apparent for anyone playing the game.
That's all from me this week. I can't be arsed to post any screenshots right now, it's 6am and I'm knackered, but I'll get some up during the week if I remember.
