Hello ladies & gentlemen, apologies for the lack of updates over the past two weeks; Everything has been rather busy and chaotic plus there wasn’t really much in the way of news worthy things to write.

Game Progress

I’m now done with cleaning up the code for the game and it’s many libraries so it’s nice and organised ready for some help on that front, I’m much happier with it now and have even added the ability to change resolution and toggle full screen display with some keyboard short-cuts which I had been meaning to get around to for a while.

I’ve also overhauled and fixed the weird issues I was having with collision. In the process I’ve made some handy debug display stuff to aid me diagnosing problems on that front in the future too. Hopefully fixing those issues will mean sorting out the draw order of tiles and objects will be easily fixed now as well.

And lastly I’ve started getting the new interaction controls to work, it’s still early days on this but it’ll mean that interacting with the world is much more intuitive. Hopefully I’ll be able to put a video up soon to show the new method in action.

New Team Member

I would like to give a warm welcome to Dan Ward (a.k.a. ButtonsZ) who is kindly offering his help on the code side of things. Dan is an old friend of mine who has recently graduated university with a first (clever sod) and is a programming ninja. Dan will be helping out on the game in his spare time when he’s not working which will really help speed things up. Welcome on board Dan!

Where To Next

So the plan for October is to mainly work on the exploration controls, improving collision and adding path finding which should make the game much more fun when you are wandering about the world. We’ll also be looking into further developing the map system, giving the ability to exit and enter buildings, move between building floors and also adding in a sewer system which will be an important way to get around safely. One thing we also want to look into getting working is the ability to use skeletal based artwork created using a tool called Spine. This will vastly improve the animation quality of the player and enemies but not only that it will also mean we can do some rather cool new things. Definitely go and check out the program here: http://esotericsoftware.com/

Ok, back to work I go!

Alex