Lucky Day
Daywatch
I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel for this thing. Its faint but still visible.
I got on a tear and it looks like it will be straightforward to add levels and creatures now. Fleshing them out will be the hard part. Giving unqique features to the monsters and then testing for some balance. Also, the dungeons will want to be interesting and I'll have to think about scripted events in them and how to implement it.
I have to see about building larger dungeons too so I can see how they work overssized on the MiniMap screen. Incidentally, I added a button to the main display to get a quickminimap without having to camp first. I need to stop turning off the music when launching it too so it continues the audio theme of where you are. Its something I couldn't see (hear) in the emulator because audio on VirtualBox still doesn't work.
I have run into a bit of snag. I want to add a Load button to the start screen and have the player be able to continue their autosave. I knew before this was hard but I'm making a stab at it. The problem is several-fold - moving to the play screen starts a new game by defaults and saves itself to the Autosave. The way it has been working is the player would need to start the game, go to camp then load one of the five saves. The Autosave, being reset, is already lost. Part of the problem was that I hadn't originally used the start screen as the entry point. I tacked it on and made it. Its easy to launch the main activity from there but to load a game a load of the data has to already exist.
What I am attempting to do to make it work is a compromise. The load screen get's the user's choice and if its a legit save loads the main activity and prompts the start that they made a new choice (that this is not a new game). The devil is in the details for this. All sorts of issues pop their head like the "Press Middle to Move Forward" image coming up and you have to compensate. The worst is that darn "Original Tile" resetting itself again.
Another problem too is the code is sufficiently mature now that when bugs do come up putting out the little fire can get messy. The code starts to lose its structure and can get disjointed.
Nevertheless, I wouldn't do this if I didn't think it was wanted. At least, that's the way I want it .
PS - tracked down a bug in inventory not dropping I thought I fixed. Testing I found it works perfect when a first drop is made so I tracked it down to a persistence flag being ignored. I had worked out a way to call Alert Dialogs generically from a single function and actually return values. However, I didn't know the code completed before its flag could change by the user in the dialog itself.
I reverted the code to be embedded instead of calling a function and doing the task within the dialog. Its creates repetitive lines but its functionality doesn't require you to jump through hoops this way.
I got on a tear and it looks like it will be straightforward to add levels and creatures now. Fleshing them out will be the hard part. Giving unqique features to the monsters and then testing for some balance. Also, the dungeons will want to be interesting and I'll have to think about scripted events in them and how to implement it.
I have to see about building larger dungeons too so I can see how they work overssized on the MiniMap screen. Incidentally, I added a button to the main display to get a quickminimap without having to camp first. I need to stop turning off the music when launching it too so it continues the audio theme of where you are. Its something I couldn't see (hear) in the emulator because audio on VirtualBox still doesn't work.
I have run into a bit of snag. I want to add a Load button to the start screen and have the player be able to continue their autosave. I knew before this was hard but I'm making a stab at it. The problem is several-fold - moving to the play screen starts a new game by defaults and saves itself to the Autosave. The way it has been working is the player would need to start the game, go to camp then load one of the five saves. The Autosave, being reset, is already lost. Part of the problem was that I hadn't originally used the start screen as the entry point. I tacked it on and made it. Its easy to launch the main activity from there but to load a game a load of the data has to already exist.
What I am attempting to do to make it work is a compromise. The load screen get's the user's choice and if its a legit save loads the main activity and prompts the start that they made a new choice (that this is not a new game). The devil is in the details for this. All sorts of issues pop their head like the "Press Middle to Move Forward" image coming up and you have to compensate. The worst is that darn "Original Tile" resetting itself again.
Another problem too is the code is sufficiently mature now that when bugs do come up putting out the little fire can get messy. The code starts to lose its structure and can get disjointed.
Nevertheless, I wouldn't do this if I didn't think it was wanted. At least, that's the way I want it .
PS - tracked down a bug in inventory not dropping I thought I fixed. Testing I found it works perfect when a first drop is made so I tracked it down to a persistence flag being ignored. I had worked out a way to call Alert Dialogs generically from a single function and actually return values. However, I didn't know the code completed before its flag could change by the user in the dialog itself.
I reverted the code to be embedded instead of calling a function and doing the task within the dialog. Its creates repetitive lines but its functionality doesn't require you to jump through hoops this way.