Hehehe, the demo is getting there. Last week I sent over a beta version for MZ to test out, and since then it’s gotten even better.
Here’s all that’s left:
Gameplay music track needs more
Sounds
Tweaking “final feature A”
Adding “final feature B”
Some graphics
Unfortunately, I’m at that point in school where I have 2 weeks to do two final projects, memorize 10 hours of music, cram 50 years of history into my head, write a 12-page research paper, perform in four concerts, etc.
So I won’t be working on it for the next two weeks.
Oh wait: “Double posting is void after the period of 5 days.”
So I’ve been working on this tech demo a lot each day now, and I plan to continue doing so for the next few weeks, and here is the current status!
THINGS LEFT TO DO:
Sounds (it’s still just background music)
Music (gah, this is the new bottleneck. Just gotta finish this one really long and convoluted track…)
“Main Point” (pretty much done, just maybe a few more tweaks)
Graphics (So close to being done, just a few important missing pieces)
I’ve had several IRL people beta test it already and I made adjustments based on that. Basically, the gameplay is all done, and I could just release it as-is, but I really don’t want it to have any obvious missing things, like graphics and music and sounds.
Just finished putting in all the sounds (include a few reverb and stereo effects, ehehehe). Went faster than I expected.
Tons of other minor improvements all over the place today.
Getting there…
Everything is done except the music. The gameplay track is 4:30 in length which is not long enough. There are also still a few small but important adjustments I should make before I release this tech demo.
Smudge is right. I’m on a tour and Internet is scarce. The demo is done. I’m going to release it as soon as I get back to the U.S. in a little over a week.
I’m so sorry that it took longer than expected but I hope it was worth it.
So a month ago I wrote out a big wishlist of improvements for my engine, based on what went well/didn’t go well when making DYF, and I’ve been working on them since then.
Basically little things, like having to compensate for text always being displayed offset in one direction, or error messages not reporting what file they’re from. Any time an object had an error it would cancel everything else in the frame, so if I was testing anything new the camera would usually go flying off in some direction while I get bombarded with 60 errors per second.
These and several other things are all fixed and revamped now, but there are plenty more on the list. I’ll keep at it.
Today was mostly a cosmetic update. Gave the engine this animated error screen for when projects fail to load.
The title font is by MetroidZapper. I also used that font to give the exe an icon with various sizes.
One issue that came up while making DYF was cutting out and animating sprites from sprite sheets. I wrote my own small app to do this, but it’s hard to use and has the bare minimum features to get the job done. Basically it used only mouse controls, there was no zoom feature, and sometimes I had to use a touchpad. Talk about eye strain!
So now there is a 4x zoom feature, and keyboard controls for pixel adjustments. Still hard to use, but at least there’s no more trial-and-error-shove-face-into-monitor. Next up, revamping how game objects interact with resources (images, audio, etc.).
So my work on object-resource interaction was interrupted… by the release of SDL 2.0.
I’ve always hated SDL but for some reason kept coming back to it, eventually using it in NetMission just to create a window and get keyboard/mouse input.
But SDL2 addresses most of my complaints, so I made the upgrade and now there’s a lot more room for some extra features. Like going fullscreen without losing all the loaded sprites, or trapping the mouse in the window so you don’t accidentally click outside of DYF and pause the game
