things are hectic

working on KoTG story line, scrapping it down is somewhat painful but necessary. I imagine by today I’ll have it cut about in half… haven’t started taking apart the maps yet.

Life is getting hectic, must less down time and my wife is due with our next baby in 5 weeks, every saturday I am working on building houses (soon to be working on my own), Sundays laundry at my dads, Mondays I have homeowners classes for the next 5 weeks, Tuesdays I visit family, so don’t expect much in the way of updates for a while afterwards.

on to level 9

finished level 8, but am thinking of switching it around with an earlier level

no motivation week

Really didn’t feel like working on games this week. Between car troubles and oppressive heat I had little desire to do much of anything extra… But I still did work on the games.

In BE, I continued working on level 8. And then ditched it because it sucked and started over. Also still trying to balance the previous levels plus their new entities.

I’m starting to rethink KoTGs scope, I’m thinking a smaller game is the only type of game that will ever get finished, as of now I typically just feel overwhelmed by the amount of maps I need to make to get anywhere in the game. As such I’ve been reviewing the story and cutting stuff that while nice is not central. I will also be switching to one central town (requires a bit of story changes but not as much as I first expected when making the decision) and a forest hub from which the dungeons will emanate. The biggest thing this causes is a shorter but more action packed game, I’m hoping it’s a worthwhile trade off.

lvl 8

only BE again: finally got it so you cannot kill fireballs, or other ents that cannot be jumped on. (I think this time at least.) Started level 8, not much to show of it yet however. Also went around and edited ent’s in other levels.

fixed some glitches

only worked on BE this week

• realized I forgot to make a fireball, so I made one
• worked on fixing the entity death thing. tracked it down to the fact that the same map is being loaded, so I added a transitional map in. works fine now, just a longer gap between when you die and the level restarts but also no more disappearing map ents!
• Fixed it so that non-marked blocks with items in them can now be recieved.
• Finished level 7

still mostly chr stuff

updated to the new official release of verge. (all it took was replacing the SVN version I had going with the new one.)

BE: worked on getting the new enemy art into chr files, and worked on the further levels.

more chr art

still working on enemy art for BE. it’ll likely change a bit and have more additions but it’s looking like I have enough to work out where to go after placing all of what I’ve got already.

working on chr art

started working up some more  monsters for BE. I also broke the camera, and the entity death system.. working of fixing them

here’s the start of one:

back up and running

new graphics card is up and running, much faster and cheaper than the 4 year old card I used to have. I took the opportunity to upgrade my ram to the full 4 gigs as well since the box was open and I had the slots. Amazing difference in speeds even though the computer was already plenty fast. Glad I can do that stuff myself.

finished up level 6 in BE as well.

EDIT: here’s a screen shot

working it out on paper

PC is down for the count, the graphics card gave up the ghost yesterday which means I cannot edit the game itself but fear not. I did indeed work on it, although my file saying what I did is stuck on a computer where I cannot see it. I’ll be ordering the new card soon if all goes well.

Because of this I’m going to focus on expanding my outline that I have on a piece of paper into a more defined storyline. I’m thinking this will also help out as the game goes forward becuase I know how on paper and in game are different in a much better way.