I've generated enough of the green caves tileset to start building maps with it. There is still an incredible amount of work left in terms of world building. At first blush it didn't seem like it would take quite as long as it is. Level building itself simply takes a long time. I'm beginning to wonder if there might be some easier way to speed up the process, but it seems unlikely. In a tile-driven world, you really do need to place all the tiles piece by piece. Maybe I just need to implement a various tile-sized bucket fill?

Other than world building, I updated the Neverfall page with some new screenshots that use the current tilesets.

A few bug fixes this time around. First, an easy one: map background image coordinates were saved out incorrectly. Thankfully, it hasn't affected any of the previously saved maps. That's good! Turns out I was saving the texture height as the texture width. All background textures so far have been square--so I've been lucky! I noticed when I tried using a new background I hadn't used before. That one was a freebie.

The control mechanics for walljumping has bugged me for a while now. When you jump into a wall and then push away, the user "sticks" to the wall surface for a moment to allow you to execute a wall jump. This didn't always trigger correctly (or sometimes triggered when it shouldn't). This has been updated so it's less optimistic, allowing the player to maneuver through really tight spots without always clinging to walls. In addition to that, it wasn't always obvious (to the player) why their character was sticking to the wall. It seems like a bug. You'll now have a visual indication of when your player is "ready" to do a walljump. I think, overall, the walljumping is going to be the number one control issue with the game. I'll need to give it some more attention to weed out all the little quirks.

Outside of coding land, world completion rate is at around 33% for maps. That's good! I hit a roadblock, however, in that I'm now at an area of the world that doesn't have a full tileset. Due to that, it's time to put my artists hat back on. I've been tiling and extending the previous set I posted a while back...

It's been some time since I seriously tinkered with the codebase. This time around I tackled a few issues. The first was the saving and loading of the world objects. There was a bunch of missing gaps that I'm surprised I didn't notice until just now. The worst offender was that certain object types simply were not writing out to the file, and, if encountered somewhere in the middle of the list of all the objects would cut off writing of the file. Very bad. Needless to say, thats been cleaned up. On top of that, I finally added in some versioning to each object that attempts to write itself to the master list. Moving forward this will be really important so I can enable writing of a new version while still reading in an old version, thus preventing the necessity of having to obliterate the master object list and recreate it from scratch. Versioning is good! It's something I don't do enough of.

In the realm of adding functionality as opposed to fixing bugs: I enabled mp3 support in the game engine. This is something that's been around in my framework forever--but I simply never added wrappers for it in the game's engine. It's there now, and I'm experimenting with different types of background music (not my own, of course), to see what style fits the best. I really need to put my musician hat on and start generating some new music. Either that, or find someone else who has a better musician hat than I do!

Lastly, I revisited the save game browser. The first incarnation was a usability nightmare. Originally it worked like the following:

• First item was "exit" (backs you out of the browser)
• Next item is the "oldest" save created
• Followed by each newer consecutive save creation date
• Last item was the "New" option, to create a new save

Now, it's a lot more usable:

• "Exit" is still first
• "New" save option is the second item
• Followed by the most recent save created
• Followed by each "next oldest" save creation date

Note that one can save a new game over an old game. These don't move up or down in the list. Basically the new usage pattern is a lot more natural. If you want a new save, you simply move to the second item in the list. If you browse the list, that most recently created save will be the next option. It's more natural to want to load a more recent save over an older save, therefore the most recent options should appear at the top of the list. Much better!


In addition to those changes, the save game rundown contains your current total playtime, total number of saves for the given game, and a datestamp of the last save. Pretty spiffy!



This gem is a remnant of the old save browser that has yet to be fixed. The thumbnail image has yet to be updated to reflect the new style of the player sprite. It's really interesting to see how the entire game style has changed over time. I remember the days when there was no visual direction to be spoken of at all.

That "back" arrow really needs to go, too!

I've been putting together more maps, but progress has been slow. To steer myself away from getting burnt out I played around a bit with the in-game menu. This is the menu that you can bring up to let you know how much of the population you have helped, what powerups you currently have in your possession, as well as how long you've been playing the game. It slides in and out of the top of the screen when summoned.

It's pretty much the same information as before--it's just presented in a much nicer fashion now. Some of the contents may need to be altered as I have yet to decide whether or not certain races are going to make the cut. At some point I will start populating the game world with inhabitants. At that point I'll see how repetitive things will get and whether or not some of the races will be a requirement or not.