flickering colours

Becoming a Game Maker: Day 3

As you may have noticed, I don’t get time to work on this project every day. But that’s not a problem for me, I’m just hoping for some consistent, steady work and progress. I am further consolidating my idea as I go, and should probably place some milestone goals at some point, but it’s a bit hard to plan when I know so little about how long certain tasks take.

Today my progress was largely off-screen. That is, I made a lot of notes about the themes of the game, the overall structure and basic fiction that will give us some reason for playing. I won’t reproduce all those notes here, partly because that would be enormously tedious for me, and partly because I don’t want to spoil the little fiction that I am writing for this game before its even playable. Suffice it to say that there is a hub, with four ‘temples’ to explore/solve/complete, and a few new mechanics in each temple.

So, as for mechanical progress, I mainly implemented a torchlight system. I toyed around with a few different options. The first one I tried ended up being what I stuck with—using a huge dark sprite with a gradient-to-transparent circle centred on the player. That gives a great illusion of the player emitting light. I also created floor-mounted torches which will light up when the player touches them. Those I used the draw and blending functions to emit a soft yellow glow.

So, since that’s basically all the mechanical developments, I’m going to export an exe of the game as it stands now, and whoever is reading this can just play around in the room I’ve created. Just for reference: WASD to move one block at a time, left click on skeletons to destroy them, the rest is basically self-explanatory.

Download the game here. 

So I just tested this download link, and Chrome warned me that the file appears malicious. It isn't, really. I haven't created this RPG project as an elaborate ruse to distribute a virus to all my personal friends and blog readers.