Friday 12 February 2010

Firefly stories

Finally after days of programming the lighting routine is almost done. I'm in level theme five and it's going to be faster to finish level themes now that lighting is there. I think it could be nice to "hide" in darkness. When you go in dark area monsters could not see you.

Throwing items has become unstable and there are now nine known bugs which is a lot compared to two known bugs in the previous version. The more I work on this project the less I want to release the source code, but a promise is a promise.

Saturday 6 February 2010

The engine strikes back

I'm progressing in third level theme of Teemu. I needed something new for items: duration and a flag telling if the item is active. Adding something like this in object class is very easy, but when your engine doesn't support them it's time for good old refactoring.

The problem in this case was that items in inventory are not real objects. When you pick up an item it becomes just an int variable in inventory list, and is then re-created when you toss it back in the gameworld. This all changes when you have things like duration to store. You could, in theory, refactor inventory so that it has the copy of object's duration. In fact there is one that kind of variable already: the amount of items. However the amount is something that can be controlled quite easily. Duration is different story, because it's natively controlled inside the object class. So, in order to proceed in level theme three I have to refactor inventory to store objects instead of ints.

While I'm at it, I could unify the inventory and new tool inventory with one base solution. The inventory was kind of braindead from the beginning, but I think it was the fastest way to produce something playable. I blame the old school roguelike programming now biting me on the leg like a grid bug.

Friday 5 February 2010

Teemu progress report

I think the "engine" is ready enough for action. I have been adjusting level themes (one at a time) for new game content and so far it looks good. There are themes that require more work, but some themes are ready to go. It's needless to say, but this version is far from ready. It could be interesting if someone is willing to continue the development of the official Teemu after I have released the source code, but I'm not expecting too much from that (developer people always have their own main projects). I will continue the development some day, but there is one small thing preventing me to do that right after the release: Kaduria.