gearleaf.com

Finished the insides of all of the small houses and finished up the animations for one direction of walking for the female villager (which isn't in the demo, sorry).

Download this week's Geas alpha!

Sorry about the lateness. My weekend was full of fruitless debugging on a different project, so I didn't get to the stuff I wanted to do on Geas.

Discussion

So, more map building. I'm at the point that I actually need to start producing more art so next week may just be a pretty-pictures day.

Also, remember a few months ago, when I was whining about not being able to build a proper Class-Object model in Lua? Well, I've actually managed it. I'm undecided though, whether I'm going to drop it into vklua or not.

In fact, I'm undecided about vklua as a whole! I was intending to build vklua as a nice OO way to use Verge, and build a decent RPG toolkit on top of it. I'd make Geas with it and then let whoever wanted to use it, use it. I'm starting to wonder if that's a good idea, for two reasons: a) making things generic takes more time (built really will ultimately probably save me some time down the road) and, more saliently, b) other people are already doing this. I'm considering switching to Overkill's vx, for one. Overall I kind of don't want to rewrite all my stuff! But I guess it wouldn't be that bad.

I'm just unsure. I'll decide something in the next couple of weeks. For now I've got a bunch of art to do so it isn't a big deal right now.

Sadly, no Geas today. Free time is spotty these days. Instead I'm going to do some rambling about other stuff that I've been working on. Just ignore my post this week if you don't feel like reading it. I'll have more Geas next week.

First of all, I'm sure most people I talk to are sick of hearing about this, but there's a pretty cool project I've been working on at work. It involves doing some lightweight electronics stuff which I haven't really done before. It's good fun. Here's a video of it:

The other thing I've been working on a lot is less practical and more nostalgia-laden for me.

When I was young I spent quite a bit of time on MUDs (notably Ancient Anguish and Age of Insanity. I also, at the urging of a friend, spent a lot of time on MicroMuse. A few years ago, some university friends and I set up a MOO (basically a MUSH-style system, but a Perl-based, object-oriented scripting language). It was fun.

So I'm writing one.

I've always said I wanted to write and/or run a MUD. I realize that, from the point of view of recognition and revenue-generation, it's basically useless. But! As a programming exercise it raises some interesting issues. It has a simple TCP server, multiple threads that need to communicate, keeping a database up to date with concurrent connections, modifiable code, and so on and etc. So I figured I may as well give it a go. I've had starts on MUD engines before but I'm approaching the point where I'm a little further ahead than ever before, at least in some aspects.

Once the MUDthing is a little more stable and playable I will certainly post connection information. You can wait with bated breath now if you feel that you must.

Anyway, that was my week.

Drew a chair.

Download this week's Geas alpha!

I also hooked up insides for all of the other "generic small houses" in Shoda's brook. Unfortunately I only had time to spruce up a couple of them; the rest are fully functional in terms of getting in and out but are just empty rooms.

Discussion

I think I'm about done with the chair jokes.

Anyway, I'm basically finished the set of stuff I need for the small normal houses; I've got to still draw things like stairs and a forge and all that, but those will come. This is why I hooked up all of the insides. Next I should probably focus more on sprites so I have more than one and a half villagers with which to populate the world.

That's right, I didn't even manage to make a chair this week! What I did manage, though, was to put in preliminary functionality for chests and other "search a spot and get an item" sorts of things, stuck in doors that open when you walk through them (including sound effect), and added speech portraits.

Download this week's Geas alpha!

I also drew a table. There are now interiors to the two houses just south of the store.

Discussion

Okay, let's run down the new things for this update:

The doors are a simple "walk on this tile, change the tiles in a certain layer". Nothing particularly exciting.

The chests go a different route than I usually do, and one that I think is more sound in the long run. Before I've just manually checked each chest at map entry and modified it as needed, telling myself that eventually I'd come up with a better idea. This time, I created a "chest registry" which lets me just, at map entry, call geas.registerChests(), passing it a list of chests on the map and where they are. It will automatically update them so they are opened if necessary, and that sort of thing.

The speech portrait for Kiel is a place holder than I drew by mouse quickly to have some art to stick in. If nothing else it needs to be redrawn so that it isn't so big; I think it takes up too much screen real estate when someone is talking. Anyway, it's easy for me to use -- I just toss an image with a name like speech_name.png in res/portraits, and it loads them all. When I call a speechbox, I give it a name, "kiel" or "kiel_sad" for instance, and it uses that loaded portrait.

See you next week.

Just enabled viewing of comments for everyone, and added a login/account creation thing to the menu. You can now respond to me when I ask leading questions, and you can make fun of me for only accomplishing "drew a chair" next week.

Right now it's all captcha-free and I'd prefer to leave it that way. If things get out of hand I'll look into adding one, though.

There's a bundle of new graphics this week. They're pretty much all furniture. The house interiors are looking pretty nice, if I do say so myself. I also started another sprite.

Download this week's Geas alpha!

To see the new content, check out the general store and the house just northwest of it (which happens to belong to the sisters who own the store).

Discussion

As is usual for art updates, there isn't a whole lot to talk about. It's not very fun to draw tons of furniture but it IS really fun to place it in maps, so I guess it balances out.

I did make one small change in the code. In my map handling, I call setupmap(), if it is defined, before doing any of the loading graphical stuff. I realized that if I want to have a cutscene happen when you enter a map (see the store) then I'd have to set up another call after the fades happen and so on; thus we now have a function called entermap() which gets called after all setup and fading and whatever has happened.

Another thing I did (which I'm sure doesn't matter to anyone but me) is that I injected a little bit of actual story development type stuff. It would be great if, by the time the game is anything resembling a 'game', then the people of Shoda's Brook will seem like old friends to all of you! ... Anyway, have a good week, people.

I've just posted up an old comic that I did a while back.

Let's get this out of the way first: The comic is terrible. Even if you're my mom you don't have to like it. It sprang from me having an idea for a very short stupid joke (see the first comic on the page there) and sketching it out in Paint.

It was kind of fun in that "har har I make dumb joek" way, so I figured I would make a few more until I got sick of it. The idea was to spend no more than fifteen minutes, including writing, drawing, and updating of the original HTML page that held them all, on any one strip.

I got five strips done, and received a guest strip (somehow). Then I stopped. Unless my judgment begins to repeatedly fail me, I don't think I'll be doing any more, but I figured I'd stick it up there anyway.