December 2017

Progress report - December 2017

Progress has been a bit slower than i'd like this winter.
Changes were mostly under-the hood, however some were artistic and aesthetic in nature.

Map editor

A developer-only map editor has been written, which will never be intended for public use, however it is a necessity for the development process, as i expect plenty of levels to be made and a tool must be built for that purpose. So far it is quite basic in nature, able to spawn floor entities, npc's, walls and items, but i plan to add ability to create complex scenarios, with extensive functionality for the tool.

File systems

As before the map files as well as all other data was stored in a plain text format within the game folders, this is no longer the case. The levels are now saved in a custom file format, data held in binary form, allowing for rapid speeds of loading as well as increased difficulty of possible corruption of the data by user editing it in a text edition of software like notepad or such.

Additionally, the animations and objects are being moved to this new file system, with the intention being to allow to implement new game objects, animations, levels and possibly more with zero additional code being written. Currently all objects and animations have their ID's hardcoded into the game's code using enums, which meant that in order to use the object in game, or implement it in the game in any way, required a programmer to implement the new enum into the game's code. Now, each object and animation is named with a string and animations are loaded only once, then found in the game memory.

Aesthetic re-do

The game's artists has decided to perform an artistic overhaul changing the perspective of the game as well as starting to create multiple sprites to use for the game.

That's all for December.