1 month shy of hitting the 2 years without re-installing windows everything broke. Spent all the gamedev time rebuilding the system.
There goes my chance of hitting the 1GAM March entry.
So much software and config stuff to fix.
1 month shy of hitting the 2 years without re-installing windows everything broke. Spent all the gamedev time rebuilding the system.
There goes my chance of hitting the 1GAM March entry.
So much software and config stuff to fix.
In the funniest of ironies the advice that got me making progress by leaps and bounds this week came from me, as randomly re-tweeted by the 1GAM twitterbot.
#gamedev wisdom by @drakkheim: don't build a rocket ship when a bicycle will get you there. via #1GAM http://t.co/b9vQDB0HaU
— One Game A Month (@OneGameAMonth) March 21, 2014
And yet here I was wasting a month doing exactly that building a rocketship of an editor when all I just needed was to look for off the shelf parts.
One quick download of the Tiled editor (http://www.mapeditor.org/) and a quick peek at the raw file format reveals that it saves the files in XML.
A few hours later, and I have a functional loader which generates in-game rooms from maps saved from tiled.
Bulkify it and presto, all the levels are loaded automatically and the maze generator from week 1 now has a collection of rooms to choose from.
And so after a very long weekend, we’ve got a whole map being generated (ok so there’s still some significant glitches, but at least it’s loading it all from disk, generating a random maze and creating a bazillion prefabs from it)
Ok so we’re going to go on pretending February didn’t exist at all and here we are at the beginning of milestone 2.
Good progress this week (ok it’s been 2 days, short week)
No new playable build for a bit, there’s just a lot of groundwork to do before any of this stuff pays off.
“Just what is the big push for Milestone 2” I hear you ask?
Full game map generation and room editor.
This week I think I’ve got the maze generator 90% of the way there, it’s now generating a maze and throwing in some internal extra branches because the basic depth first algorithm doesn’t have a lot of internal branches for smaller mazes like BSDDoD will be using.
And secondly
I’ve got a level editor 75% functional, still needs to write the output files and have some sort of load capability. But it draws the level and lets you select and fill tiles.