Friday, September 23, 2011

HA! Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated!

First and foremost, to the few people who still follow this page - the project is NOT dead, but is continued at a comatose pace due to my kid being almost 3 and requiring all the attention in the world that I can spare outside of working full-time, having a 4-hour (2-hr one way) daily commute, and also doing a bunch of on-the-side freelancing.
Also, this "little" slump in development has originally resulted from a fairly sizable misstep in the coding process. As I have previously written here - I was working on a custom world editor for the game. A flexible little thing that could be activated on the fly and could move objects, edit the tileset, and add all sorts of cool flags and functionality to the rooms. The sub-project started beautifully - the tile-editing engine, the old-format level importer, and partially the object editor all worked well enough, but when it came time to implement it into the game - all sorts of horrible ripple effects started happening. You see - the room transition in LOI is a delicate affair, as it is executed without any reliance on triggers or teleports, with room simply being switched from underneath Iya as she continues the same action she was doing all along. Slide out of one room, and you will come out sliding in the next room. Jump-kick while the rooms are transitioning - and the move will carry over at the exactly the same frame it left off. Needless to say this process is fairly timing-sensitive. Unfortunately - the new level loader refused to play nice with this system. Not only was the pause between room-loads too excessive, but it threw off the timing of the character and a bunch of other internal processes. I struggled with this purely code issue for about a month, but decided to abandon the new level editor altogether, as for it to work a large chunk of the game would have to be rewritten: (
Oh - and for those expecting to see some new art, here are some random things:


<<---WIP modular enemy - not a boss, regular enemy ala Castlevania's Golem and Knight-things.

Alright - I hope the coming of autumn spurs my creativity once more, and I will finally get to a place where I can show the game off to you as at least a demo: )

Cheers guys, and thank you for continuing to care. I will NOT abandon this thing, I promise!
Andrew.

Monday, February 14, 2011

It's been a while!

If in your most cynical hour you thought that LOI project has come to a standstill, you weren't far from the truth. It has been a tough few month trying to make headway in development, and to be honest I have been in a bit of despair about it. Most of my problems at this point stem from the inexcusable awfulness that is GameMaker's built in level editor, which I have bitched about on many previous occasions. Therefore, I have ended up building my own level editor, but with such a large tool having to be written from scratch I have encountered many issues. It works now, but still has many problems and lacks many of the features the final editor has to have. Several times during its development I almost quit, but every time I opened the default editor my resolve has returned. Hopefully once I iron out a couple more kinks in my program and start cranking out rooms things will get back on track.