Hey wide world, I’ve been just ridiculo-busy with what have you, but here I am to tell you the Overworld haps.
I’m rounding out an extremely prolonged graphical development arc that began a few months before EGLX which I believe was back in March or April as the crow flies. This started with engineer Jeremy Sachs’ excellent integration of the pixi.js graphics library, and a cutover to event-based descriptions separating the core game engine from the UI layer.
- Many in-game events, especially common ones, now have a visual representation in characters on the screen including movement, attack, terrain struggle, and receiving damage.
- Status cues such as sleep, stun, and being hidden now also appear on the map.
- Level, health, and other hero status effects were fully incorporated into upper and lower HUDs.
- Inventory was also folded into the HUD, and the images became their own buttons for use.
- Compasses were compacted from words into images bordered by their key colour.
The most exciting thing I’ve added recently is cutscenes. These take the place of log messages where NPCs describe plot, shopkeepers negotiate, or other general world events take place. I came up with quite a pleasing, reusable arrangement where any character can discuss ideas with any other, survey a scene, or muse on events.
Finally, since I don’t find the time to do this every day, I’ll share my plan to proceed with an alpha.
- Make game restartable without refreshing page
- Run profiler to look for memory leaks
- Production environment, javascript obfuscation
- Sign up page, accounts, login
- Basic personal and public scoreboards
- Storyboard how-to-play
- Forum
At all points along this path, I’ll have to pause to squash annoying bugs, especially ones that can spoil a nice run. Realistically, with all that we are probably looking at end of year minimum. x_x
Software development is a hard road, kids! If you really want to try it early, come see me in LA (which is where I currently abide).
Cheers!