So I felt kind of ill for a bunch of today, but I managed to get something done.
It's a cell for the Sully Chronicles, specifically the introduction of Paxton the cleric. He's a disdainful chap.
Sorry, that's it for now. We'll see how next week treats me.
Okay, I am updating.
I've been super busy, but I managed to squeeze in an update. The combat know has bouncy numbers. Also I've discovered a bug in my particle system (but not how to fix it yet).
I've hacked my particle system into being able to define ANY function for displaying the particle. Unfortunately it relies on passing -1 as the image to display for the particle, which is a dumb, magical way to do it. I plan to fix it; I just wanted to see if I could do this the way I thought I could. And I could!
Which is cool. This allows for lots of silly things in combat. I can do "miss!" and such in exactly the same way.
Anyway, as I said, I discovered a bug in the particle system: Sometimes particle lifespans don't go away when they get removed? For some reason, the onhit sparklies were killing the bouncy number waaaay too soon. I'm not sure what's causing this. I'll look into it.
I know you wait with bated breath.
I just moved, a harrowing experience if ever there was one.
Anyway, I'm sort of trying to make up for missing Sunday.
It's for Sully. It's not actually added into Sully yet. It's where Crystal is being kidnapped by Lord Stan. Hopefully McGrue likes it (he hasn't seen it yet!)
Hi there.
Things are crazy busy for me this week. I haven't gotten any more Geas work done, and I'm not sure that I'll have time to do so before tomorrow. So! I'm going to post this other verge-related work now instead: MacVerge!
Now, I didn't do most of the porting. That was done by Mac Wizard and all around Cool Guy, Jesse, a while back. However, since he got a job with a nasty non-competition contract, he hasn't been able to keep it up. I went through and fixed up the worst of the outstanding issues (though some still remain). You can either get the .app from above or you can go check out your own copy from the SVN and build it yourself! (The SVN repository resides at http://www.verge-rpg.com/svn/verge3/, username anonymous and password anonymous.) It includes an xcode project that should build out of the box. If it doesn't, please let me know.
Simply drop the .app into any unzipped Verge game and hopefully it will work! It might not though. If it doesn't, it's possible that the game tries to use multiple windows — the Mac version is based on SDL and cannot (and was never able to) use multiple windows. Barring that, there may be a few more bugs! I know it works with Sully (as long as you stay outside the battle system) and with Geas, but I haven't tested it much more extensively than that. If you've got a Mac, please go and grab some Verge games and try them out with this .app! If you get any strange errors please let me know.
I may be unable to update next Sunday. I'm moving next weekend and as such I will be short on time and may not have a computer set up for long enough to get anything worthwhile done. I hope not to miss an update (again) but if I do I will make up for it!
So I did finally do something last night that I can count as a Gruedorf update. If all goes according to plan, I'll still be updating Sunday night, but here we are.
It's an introduction graphic for Lance, a character in Sully. (I know, I didn't know he existed until just a few weeks ago either!)
I'm quite proud of it, and it was fun and not terribly difficult. So yeah. Good stuff.
Right. It's time that I need to go to sleep (I still have a day job that expects me to show up in the morning) and I've got nothing. I've spent the last few days in a terrible funk. I started working on some Sully stuff but uh... that got far enough that I drew (really, recoloured) a head.
If it makes anyone feel any better, I did add a captcha system to the comments so I'll stop getting 30 spam messages a day (hopefully).
Oh hey, I could show this picture I drew you a while back.
I'll update some time this week, hopefully. Not that my life will be any less hectic in the next few days, but hey. Maybe I'll manage it.
What's this? A semi-functional battle system? Finally using the particle system for something other than making snowflakes fall on my characters? Madness!
Go activate the guy wandering around to battle it out with him! There are still some outstanding issues that occasionally cause crashes but I'm pretty sure that I know about all of them and they're reproducible but unlikely to happen to you. If they do, just try again.
Today I felt vigorous and decided to just go ahead and hack right into the battle system. I steamrolled over a few of the blocks I've been having by just sort of ignoring them and trusting I'll get to them later. I guess? I don't know what's been wrong with me the last few weeks, but I am glad to be back to producing actual progress.
Anyway, the additions are fairly straightforward. Once you've decided to attack (the only option that really works) you can choose a monster (which... well, there's currently only one possible monster but it should work with more, honest!) and you'll attack it. Currently the only feedback on the attack is a debugging string, reduction in the metres, and some particles being generated. Still, it's an attack nonetheless, and a far sight better than it was this morning!
The other thing is that I guess I cleared some sort of mental hurdle because I just... know where to put stuff now. I'd been at a bit of a loss in terms of design for the system, but when I started working today it just didn't seem to be an issue anymore. I guess maybe I just needed a couple of weeks away from the code to gain some perspective? I don't know. Again, I'm just happy it worked out!
Hey, I drew some more pictures.
So this last week was a vacation from work for me. So, instead of going to work I figured I'd get lots done on my game! So then I went and registered a business name, had a meeting with a possible future client, had a lot of discussions with a future co-worker, picked up a mud server I had stopped working on, set up a couple of wikis that I'd been intending to set up for weeks, signed a lease on a new apartment, tried (unsuccessfully) to help some friends move furniture out of their house (twice!), researched bank accounts for businesses, and started or restarted a number of video games.
So I managed to draw two more still frames of Kiel's sprite.
This is pretty awful. Every time I say that I'll get back on track for next update and start making worthwhile updates again, I fail!
This is what happens to my projects. I just need to stick with it long enough that I manage to get a second wind. Hopefully this blog and this contest will help me do so.
Thematically continuing from last week, I have no new Geas build. Instead of spending time programming within the Verge3 engine, I did some art work on Kiel's sprite.
I added the back standing frame and tweaked the front standing frame. Is it obvious that Kiel is female yet?
This last week was super manic. It vacillated between giddy, adrenaline filled highs to depressing, teary-eyed lows. I'm not even exaggerating, for once.
This next week is a week off of work — using up my paid vacation time before the end of the fiscal year. I may or may not be able to pour lots of time into Geas, but I hope to at least have a reasonable update for next week.
After I made this post, I asked McGrue what I could work on for the Sully Chronicles, the pack-in game for Verge that is the ultimate incarnation of a Verge game that has never been finished. We're trying to rectify that (more him than me).
Anyway, he offered me a code problem or an art problem, and since I was on a bit of an art kick this evening anyway I went with that. I drew the remaining required overworld sprites for Sully, and thought I'd show them off here.
As it says in the image description, the first two were drawn by Grue, and I drew the other two.
Hi, everyone.
There isn't any new Geas at all this week! Isn't that exciting?
Instead, I've spent the last few hours tinkering around the Verge engine itself! I didn't accomplish as much as I'd hoped, but I've identified a good place to focus my efforts for fixing-up for now.
What I did accomplish was some small improvements to line drawing code. Now your lines will draw slightly faster! These changes are, right now, available in the Verge SVN.
Other than that I've been getting a handle on how windows work, how showPage() does its double-buffering, and that sort of thing. Basically, I think there's a pretty big improvement to be made here (on the order of twice as fast, maybe) but I haven't quite figured it out yet. I'm hindered somewhat by the complete lack of commenting, and no real knowledge (before today) of how DirectDraw works.
So, excitement!
