As it turns out, OpenGL loves to check for errors after every call. This makes you spend about double the time in OpenGL every frame. We were going kinda crazy trying to figure out what the problem was; I assumed it was my fairly elaborate collision detection. But running the Python profiler exposed the truth, […]
Managed to more or less finished some of the wall and floor tiles last night. As soon as I was done (as goes with these things) I noticed a number of artistic and logical issues with tile placement that weren’t apparent while making them. In the end, I decided to start again. So far in […]
For our meeting on Saturday, I made some tiles that Fet and I could use, as mentioned earlier. These were really simple, basically a new set that had some floor tiles, some stone blocks, and some pitfalls – the basics for making a level. Since then, I’ve been working on a developing a nicer version […]
This weekend gone, Fet and I managed to carve out a few precious hours to actually work on Paraplu together in the same room. The progress was substantial. Most of the work we do on Paraplu is conceptual – either I’m making tiles outside of a level, or Fet is tweaking or introducing a new […]
Talked to Fet the other day about changing the way levels work in the game. Previously, each level was just a single screen, and now we’re looking at making it so that the edge of any given level will (optionally) take you to another screen, like in TLoZ. Moving in a more adventure game / […]
Still making progress! Managed to finish version “A” of the cliff tile-set earlier this week. Easily the most complicated tiling i have attempted. Many tiles have to be able to seamlessly tile with about 6 other tiles in any combination. In the end I managed to bother Fet into working out some slightly more flexible […]
Last night I got some good work done! Along with the work that fet was able to finish yesterday we’re making some solid progress. Pictures soon, promise. Fixed some bugs in shooting while running animation Re-exported shooting while running frames Updated palette on various grass tiles Made Mycon spawning “hole” (might change this to something […]
After putting it off for a long time (god knows with good reason) Fet managed to help me get a dev environment set up on my new Macbook. I would say that this has been something that has caused progress to be slow, but I would really just be making excuses. Regardless, it did allow […]
Until today, the only way to finish a level was to kill all of the enemies in it. Of course, with our new infinitely enemy-spewing doorway thingys, there would have to be another way. I set up an objectives system that allows us to define any number of different conditions for beating a level. In […]
Hi! Tonight I implemented a bunch of stuff to add flexibility to our map objects. When an object is added to the map, it checks a dictionary of dictionaries of dictionaries to find out if it should have any special attributes. One of the possible attributes is an “initStep”, which is the name of a […]
Today I worked on the hit points system for the main character, and the damage and dying mechanisms that that implies. Now the character has a hit point total, can be hurt by enemies and their projectiles, and dies when reaching 0 hp. Pretty basic stuff, but it was taken out for the sake of […]
Over the past couple of days, I’ve done a lot of work on the equipment system. It was harder than I expected, but now you can equip various types of items that determine how your attack works. This is the core of the “algorithmic shooter” concept we originally devised together. In Paraplu, your attack is […]
I have got the mirror system working, basically. This is how you equip weapons, accessories, and costumes. It was remarkably difficult to make a system that simply opens up a menu, then opens up another menu based on the item you chose. Those old NES RPGs full of nested menus must be a lot more […]
Not a whole lot of work today, but I’m trying to keep some momentum going. I added a wardrobe object (with awful programmer art, of course) to accompany the cabinet object in the atelier. Now, different types of items are stored in the different containers: materials in the cabinet, and costumes in the wardrobe. We’ll […]
I had a nice time coding in the little food court at Whole Foods today. – After several hours of work, taught our most basic enemy how to avoid obstacles. This is way harder than it seems, and I had to write in a bunch of psychedelic drawing effects to visualize what what happening in […]
I was determined to get into a Paraplu groove today, because it was the first time in a couple of months that I had a significant chunk of free time to myself. After getting energized by some bass-playing, coffee, pinball, and Ar tonelico music, I sat down to plow through some coding and planning tasks. […]
This was surprisingly difficult to keep from clashing with our line-break-insertion system, because item names can contain spaces. But now, like in so many classic games, we can insert item icons into our boxes, inline with the text! This will work for any Interface object, whether it’s a menu, a dialog box, or a speech […]
My work was canceled this afternoon so that people could go outside and enjoy the first really nice day in Seattle this year, but I only got as far as the lobby. I made an iced soy latte and got to work on improving the main character’s movement in Paraplu. The protagonist (or “Shipâ€, as […]
Well, today I did some serious drawing engine improvement. We now have a new type of Guy called Scenery, which has a strictly limited functionality consisting of sitting there and doing nothing at all. At the moment they can’t even animate, be transparent, or have a tint. We could add those functions in later if […]
Goodness, has it really been 8 months since I posted? We have been very busy with real-life stuff, but the Momo Pax spirit continues. For a while I was working on implementing a 2-dimensional inventory grid like in Diablo, but it turned out to be pretty prohibitively complex. In the *getting something done* spirit that […]