Stoopid progress!
I’ve been working a little more on Here be Dragn, and I’m thinking that I havent really done that much since last Monday.. The major roadblocks for me right now are random gc’s and adding features which break stuff. For example, I overhauled the audio system to use a JDK v1.5 class, Clip instead of a JDK 1.0 class, AudioClip. And even though people seem to think its the ueber solution, it misses clips randomly (though looping and sequencing samples would be quite handy for what I have in mind for the music).
I changed the render method to use texturepaints to draw images with subprecision accuracy and that really slowed everything down. Weirdly, the animation as it uses different subpixels brings in features of the original drawing that wont fit in a compressed size image. But only when its moving. I tried moving it randomly 0.6f, but that made me feel ill. Looked pretty though before I canned the concept. I decided that the reason why super-deformed is so big in CG art is because faces need more detail than the rest of the character.. So my dwarfs are now pretty squished (but I think the effect is pretty cool). I also gave them beards and differentiated the existing archers and warriors with different colour cloaks.. And beards!
In the past hour I tweaked a bit of gameplay and made archers shoot more, dwarves appear faster as the game goes on and munching them giving back less health. I made some changes to some sound effects as well, as I prefer them to sound heavily digitised.. I also did this to the soundtrack (19mb>884kb) and it sounds a lot rougher, but a bit more chiptunes.
I got some great feedback from my sister the other day (she’s really into dragons). She was content to just fly about and eat people (until I was bored) and really comfortable breaking the back buffer when the program was in full screen mode, but oddly, she wanted more people variety just so she could “eat em all”. This was kind of motivating for the beards so I can later add more colour variety. I learned from watching her that having the mouse outside of the game window breaks control, a problem I’ve experienced a few times, especially with web games.
I think I’m starting to appreciate how LD enabled me to go further than how I would generally try to make a game. I am extremely detail oriented and like my program to be “just so”.. Because of this I’m playtesting and I’m thinking; This control system feels horrible?! How can I fix that? Why is this pixel not antialiased? LD forces you to code priorities, and if you’re doing it right, essentials first.. When you have 6 hours left on the clock then its fine to drop things you’d like to be working on and move on. I have a few unfinished projects which all have similar breaking points.. I was working on a feature, couldnt do it, and then didnt come back to that project.. Which is a shame really, but with the latest one it has been really nice to have a (mostly) finished project from the start which could then always be upgraded at a later point. Having a playable project also makes it a lot more fun to come back to, so this is just the start, really.
Anyway, there are over 1000 excellent games to be playing and rating, but heres a Post LD version in case anyone is curious: