Woooow, it’s been a while since I did a written dev-log, but I decided to pick up that age-old habit with this new game project. I’ll still be doing dev-vlogs (like the one above) but I feel I can get into a bit more technical background in a written version. So these devlogs will be an addition to the videos!
I will reference the videos in these written vlogs a bit, as I don’t want to rehash the same things I said in the video but in stead add some extra information or details which I usually don’t put in the videos because it’s often technical, boring, and makes my videos way too long !
Starting a new project is always a question of starting fully from scratch, or grabbing the last game and completely stripping it from all the code we won’t be needing.. in this case, I opted for the later one and grabbed the Gunslugs:Rogue Tactics code and stripped it from all the game-specifics. Leaving me with a nice clean framework to build the new game on. Why not grab the framework I already had? Simply because it’s outdated! I’ve made a bunch of changes to the games after the last framework-commit and I haven’t had time to update the framework with all the changes.. Trust me.. this is the faster way to get the best code base to build upon!
With Space Grunts 1 I struggled a lot on getting all the game logic working for turn-based games. In my normal games I basically update everything that needs updating on every frame.. but with turn-based, you have to split up a bunch of stuff: there is a “wait for player turn” state, a “wait for players turn to complete” state, a “monsters respond” state, a “wait for monsters to complete their response” and a bunch of others.
Luckily, wrapping my head around all of that this time, was somewhat easier as I came prepared with the knowledge of the first Space Grunts!
I also learned a few things with character animations after doing Gunslugs:Rogue Tactics where I build the characters out of various parts and that allowed me to do a few more things with animation and rotating various body parts. So using that knowledge it was fairly easy to quickly have a player character up and running, and using the sprite-sorting code I created and improved during SG1, Heroes of Loot 2 and Ashworld.. I had a nice top-down world up and running within a few days of work!
Not bad for a first week (little less) of work.. to be continued!