busy life little posts

Not much to say here. I've gotten some dungeon generation code down that I like and works... most of the time. Right now it's step on switch and somewhere a wall moves so that you can pass and go forward. It's rough around the edges but it has some potential. Right now there is a bug where sometimes rooms will magically disappear and link wrong by overwriting a doorway so that you'll walk into the room and walk out of the doorway you just went through to enter an entirely different part of the dungeon. Effectively this makes it so that you can't go back past that point as the doorway that did it was replaced with another one. So fun times trying to fix this bug. For giggles here's a screenshot. I have arrows added as a shift + directional button and may use this as the standard for ranged attacks. I also have FoV made because I thought I could hack out something and well I did. Probably won't be in Legend but it was successful programing. Also added is a menu system to the left, not sure if it'll make it to the game but it was something to try.

mostly explored room

Room east of first one with 2 switches

Stepping on a "switch"

Firing an arrow at the fake door

Minor update

Worked on some tools that may or may not make it to Legend but have finally got a working a* path finding formula going. Maybe could update with something sometime soon but not much worth showing.

Field of View

Reworking the basic display parts of my game as well as storage ideas for maps. What I currently have is far too cumbersome to work though what I am making may not be too efficent. Will work on it later but results are promising. Though side tracked by trying to figure out the ever elusive field of vision formula I always mess up. Completely pointless to anything I'm working on but I still want to get it licked if I ever use it in the future.

Currently working with something called the Bresenham's line algorithm. It's working for revealing all the squares I want revealed but I'm doing something wrong in pruning the blocked ones. Still working on it and learning from it and also may have something simpler to upgrade legends engine. Would just need some readjusting to work with the current generator though.

Progress

Long short is earlier this week I had a revilation of how Zelda keys work and how I was working on something far more advanced. I probably won't be able to work on giving more updates (as if that is a change) for a while as I'm on training at work which is screwing with my scheduled and a lot of other things. We'll see how it goes but progress. I suppose next would be adding combat back in and populating with some basic move towards player gloop and moblin equivalents and adding some sorta simple boss before a shiny ending spot. Then release a demo possibly with the python to exe creator so we don't have to bother with python problems.  Either way progress.

100th post

You know I was going to hold off on a 100th post till I had more done, but life gets in the way and so does myself. I do however have things to share.

 One weekend when I couldn't get anything done a friend made a bad joke involving anime and dungeon diving and I took it to an extreme and made a prototype battle system in about two and a half hours just to see if I could. I was quite happy with myself and realized that I've been getting wrapped up in the large picture and over complicating my projects which should come as no surprise. Though I learned a lot, after all I got this running in 2 and a half hours and it fully works for what it is. Used a lot of philosophies learned from my other projects and improved on the mistakes there to make something small and entertaining. Then I made the item mixing system I always wanted to test as a side note and an odd floor viewing system.

It was really fun and not the general look at my mountain of code and see just a lot of work and breaking things to get it to work. Mostly because everything was self contained and not constantly building of each other while these things could feasibly be layered on each other which is generally how games work. So this got me to thinking about Legend and RPGroguelike as well as my friends (now plural) games I've been tinkering with.

Long short I need to rewrite a lot of things and break what I have. Not completely throw away everything, I think some of my character storage formats and other things are workable, it's just that I have them poorly formatted to what seems to be my general programing style. Short focused bursts that accomplish something without having to debug something else midway through to get it to work. It may be kinda crappy and kinda unprofessional but that's the way I work on my own fun things. I've spent enough time proving I can debug a single program for 8 hours for the majority of a week and make slow but somewhat noticeable progress and my own projects are suppose to be what I enjoy doing. So I'm going to do just that, break my projects up into smaller more manageable components and live on a philosophy of "if I can't add a chunk on my lunch break I need to make the goal smaller".

So none of my projects are dead, but I'm eyeing up better ways to construct them so I don't end up back at this monumental roadblock that keeps me from doing anything. I've already refactored my friends GUI system and am quite happy with how much easier it is. So more of a learning experience. Hopefully I'll have something to show later, may not be any time soon though. RPGrougelike is quite on my mind with how well my friends joke of an idea got done, but I may have to do more tinkering before anything comes out of it.

Haha delays and the need for flow charts

I've been slacking. Quite a few things going on but in the end I have been slacking. Trying to now schedule my time a bit more effectively and actually set some times to sit down at home and get through the hard bits which seems to be popping up in the two projects.

First off in Legends is actually getting a dungeon randomly generated with keys. Have the corridors system set up and and the key placement set up. Should be a very easy goal to accomplish but debugging it took some wind out of me so had switched up to figuring out inventory. That's mostly been designed but some problems have come up that I need answers for, mostly whats the best way to "stack" bonuses from items and interactions between items and other entities. It was real simple in my simple roguelike as just damage was passed back and forth but I plan on having some things like elemental effects of the classic zelda nature. Freezing and setting on fire namely. So without a clear plan on that it's sorta slow now. It can be done and I just need to focus a bit more on it.

RPGlike is actually going along well, getting casting in and all that. The problem is that it's slowly becoming a mess of spagettii behind the combat engine scenes with how the input is coming in and I need to figure it out before I get to the point where I consider rewriting the engine  with every new feature. So long short, I need a flowchart for both of my projects fast. So that's my next goal is to hammer out something looking like a plan for the current systems I'm working with and match code to it so I can better divide my effort instead of stopping dead at walls.

In other news my friends project is developing nicely with me hammering out the heavy lifting parts. Funny how that works but since this is so bare bones it's like junkfood to me and get things done on coffee breaks, I don't think I'll be putting most of my scheduled time to this as it's a text based game but good lord it's nice to have things work.

Random updates

Wow, getting used to this new layout is a bit weird but anyways, updates. More tweaking and figuring out some major decisions for Legend. I think I have an idea of how the incantatory is going to be set up, nothing fancy for now just current weapon, a selection of active tools, and armor pieces. RPGlike has spured this on as I have it mostly done, I just need to make the items have an effect now. RPGlike has also gotten spellcasting working in it a bit, lots of tweaking to get it up but it's framework is there.

Yeah not much getting into here, lots of things going on and work is picking up more. Also trying to help a friend learn how to code, will have to see how that goes. In any event ,progress.