First Look

Today, I am going to show a very, very primitive first look at what we're building. You won't be impressed, but the soft, creamy underbelly of what we're building is coming to fruition. In the brief demo, we're showing a basic inventory collection and use, player damage based on its current shield (Formula is still under consideration), the three dancing knights are AI driven and read from a file including all of its AI components, and the player movement has a sophisticated input system. 

As I said, this is far from impressive. The framework is nearly complete though, and we're very excited for what we've come up with.

Our next task is the map system, which I should have a demonstration of tomorrow. Currently we want to allow for switches both based on a floor switch or an area of effect, swapping of tiles for effects such as freezing water or cooling lava, collision of walls and other objects, etc. We're currently still working on this. John has something to show, but the next thing is to get it related to the rest of our framework.

We're excited at our progress, and we hope to have the Map system done tonight with a fully realized system.

Now for the technical side. We've played with some ideas using Enum bit flags which has a solid approach. Since we'll be handling collision in such a way that if you pass an x and y and it will return the tile at that location. We'd also be providing a method that returns a set of tiles within a given radius for area of effect collisions. We have a weapon that uses this extensively and quickly became a multipurpose weapon for use. I won't reveal the weapon yet, but we're excited even though it's one of the more complicated logic pieces.

Currently, the first tile system made the Tile class itself fairly complicated, and we were creating sub classes for every type of tile because we couldn't quite figure out how to encompass the large range of tiles we needed in one generic manner. So we created an enum for EventType, and made it an abstract class to allow  us to create very specific functionality to the tile such as the freezing, or a switch that activates a door (A switch is considered a tile). I was able to create this functionality using the bit flags for enums, so we'll see how we manage to incorporate it.

For now, we'll be hard at work! Happy coding!