gearleaf.com

Excitement.

Download this week's alpha release of Geas!

This update adds new portraits for Kiel (which I don't really like better but they are more consistent with Tanessa's portrait), every house in Shoda's Brook has an 'inside', and you can now leave town. Unfortunately, the overworld is still heavily in progress so you can't get BACK in town.

I've been sitting on some of this stuff since Christmas (for some reason) and some of it is more recent. Lame, I know. Anyway, I like how the overworld graphics are shaping up, though the mountains are somewhat busy. I love the little short sprites and I want to get to animating making more directions for Kiel and a new sprite for Tanessa.

In addition, the download this week features an absolutely up-to-date copy of the verge engine so it is possible that it might be a little broken for some people. Please let me know if you have any problems! Also, if you are into this sort of thing, you can look at the directory structure and see that it is SO MUCH CLEANER now that maps can be stored in subdirectories of the root.

Lastly, as I mentioned last post, I am looking into writing some documentations. I hacked together a quick system to help me write them and make them accessible, and I've put up an index of topics I intend to write on, in some sort of semblance of order that halfway makes sense to me. You can check that out at...

I'd like to hear some comments, if anyone has them, on the topics and the ordering. Please let me know if there's something I've left out or you think should come earlier or later. I'm very much wanting to produce a tutorial that focuses on getting a game made, rather than focusing just on the scripting. Hopefully it works out.

Sadly, just words again this week and not even as many. I need to get up early in the morning so I'll have to keep this short.

The Verge engine is getting close to being ready for a release. Which is great! Unfortunately we're now at the stage of a bunch of noodly bits like getting it compiled on multiple platforms and lame stuff like that. Foremost for me, I think, is fixing any bugs that crop up during testing, and to start working on a tutorial for using Verge with Lua. I'm starting to organize things in my head and I might (maybe) even manage to make a mini-post midweek about that.

Anyway yeah. Good night.

Hi everyone.

I don't have pretty pictures or a downloadable thing today, sorry. I don't really have the time before I need to go sleep to get that stuff together, and I'd like to do some bug-hunting and graphics clean up before I release what I've got done. So I'll talk about it instead. With bullet points.

On the Geas front, since the last actual update I have accomplished the following:

• The interiors of Shoda's Brook are basically complete. By "basically complete" I mean that I have pretty close to all of the tiles done that I need, but they aren't stocked with people or actual useful treasure chests or anything like that.
• I've added a map exit to the overworld map. You can't get back in yet, because the overworld is still very rough. Getting it in a good state, at least for the area around Shoda's Brook, is my next step.
• I've updated my internal code to use vx instead of my own wrappers. I'm interested in reducing library splintering so I thought it best to switch now rather than later.

Okay, maybe I can include one picture. This is a frame from Kiel's overworld sprite. Isn't she adorable?

Anyway, on the not-just-Geas front, I've also experienced a renewed interest in fixing Verge so I've been trying to put time into bug destroying and that sort of thing.

• Fixed an issue with the updated Script Engine which was throwing errors when you correctly wrote to a global engine var.
• Fixed an optimization so that it a) was actually an optimization and b) didn't prevent you from clearing the screen.
• Made some miscellaneous fixes to some problems in newly-introduced code involving images with alpha channels (which aren't fully implemented yet sorry).
• Sprites now use a std::vector for storage instead of a static array, so we no longer have a hard limit for number of sprites at a time. I want to do this for entities too but I haven't gotten around to it (it's a bit trickier).

So anyway! The upshot is that even though I haven't posted about Geas in months I am feeling pretty good about the last week. I hope to have this trend continue.

It's been a while.

There is stuff happening with Geas, but not as much as I would like, as per usual. Just like last time I posted, things have been crazy busy but now they look like maybe they're getting better. Just like last time. So we'll see. Anyway, this post is not about Geas.

It's about Hyacinth.

Hyacinth is an in-your-browser, old-school styled rogue-like. More-or-less. It has a much less punishing interface, and has some severe balancing issues. True to its roots, it's also still in development and somewhat unfinished. HOWEVER. In the spirit of "actually doing things" I decided to get it to a playable state rather than forever tweak twiddly bits that I'd like to add.

The game arose out of a need for me to learn Flex, last summer. It did that job and then lay dormant when things got busy, and I kept wishing I had the time to get back to it. A few months ago I finally got back to it, worked on it for a bit, and got busy again. In the last couple days I cleared up the worst outstanding bugs and now I am releasing it. Along the way, I got help, inspiration, and direction from my incalculably valuable colleagues, Gavin and Jesse, and far more playtesting than I could have hoped for from my lovely girlfriend tulokyn.

I'd greatly appreciate it if you could all give it a try. Just in case you miss all of the signs, "H" brings up help. Hopefully you'll figure things out from there.

And for those of you who usually shy away from rogue-likes because you happen to use a notebook with no keypad: we thought of you. You can use a 9-key "keypad" consisting of QWE, ASD, and ZXC. (The middle key, of course, is rest.) This, of course, throws a wrench in that experienced rogue-likers should take note of: drop is R, not D.

So here's a story. If you've been following my twitter feed you will have heard snippets of this, but I wanted to post SOMETHING here because it's been a month and a half when I expected to be gone for a couple of days.

Last November/December (don't remember the exact date) we decided/discovered that we needed to move out of our previous place. The story behind that isn't terribly long or complex but it's irrelevant to this particular story; suffice it to say that the reasons were more happy than upsetting and it wasn't a huge deal.

In January we found a new place -- it's on the ground floor (really half-buried so it counts as a basement apartment) with two bedrooms and nice flooring throughout, and it's reasonably sized. Plus it's pretty cheap and not too far away from downtown where my office is. Great! We decide we want to go for it and after some running around and reference checks and all that we're in. Since the previous tenant moved out early we get the keys early so we can start moving stuff over bit by bit so that there's less to do on the Big Move Day.

A few days before the Big Move Day, we stopped by with some boxes and noticed that the carpet in the corner of the smaller of the bedrooms (which we intend to use as an office/computer room) seems a bit damp. Not a huge deal, we figure, since the carpets have just been shampooed and it's probably just not dry yet. We let our landlord know though, just in case. He agrees that it's probably just left over dampness from cleaning the carpet.

So we move in. The Big Move Day is Saturday. Less than a week later, Thursday morning, I wake up at about 6:00 am to my girlfriend telling me that the floor in our bedroom (this is the larger one) is wet. I wake up, swing my feet out of bed, and they splash when they hit the carpet. A quick taking stock of the situation ensues: both of the bedrooms' carpets are wet enough that water wells up around your feet when you stand in the affected areas (which comprise the majority of the floor in the two rooms). We start hauling clothes and cardboard boxes off of the floors (remember, we've been here less than a week at this point) and call our landlord. He gets back to us after a couple of hours and then shows up with a plumber. At this point we assume a pipe burst in the storm overnight.

But no broken pipes are found. The weather outside that night WAS nasty, so we figure maybe some freezing rain caused something to back up somewhere. The carpets all get pulled out of the bedrooms and placed in a warm dry place, and the cement floor under the carpets starts to dry out. Of course, at this point, whatever water came in has ceased flowing. Next Tuesday, things are basically all dried out, so the floor gets painted with an anti mold paint and the carpets get put back in. Since there was no apparent cause, we cross our fingers and hope it doesn't happen again. All of the furniture gets put back in place and we get to sleep in our bedroom again, rather than in our living room.

We get about a week of use out of the small bedroom. We get our computers set up and the internet cabling run down the hall. It's a tiny bit cramped but it's great. Until Monday morning of our fourth week here (last Monday), we discover that the small bedroom's carpet is again wet. Thankfully this time it is in a much smaller area so we just pull up the corner and put a heater in to start drying it out. Our landlord is again puzzled by it and says the heater's good and he'll look into it more.

The following Monday (this week), the small bedroom floods again. It's worse this time. They find some cracks on the outside of the building and seal them up. Hope it doesn't happen again.

It's happened again today.

All in all this has been really frustrating and combined with the fact that things have been really busy at work for the last month, I've been sapped of energy and time.

And that is what I did on my summer vacation why I haven't been making Gruedorf posts. I've got two basically saved up but I seriously just don't have the energy to actually put them together right now. Unfortunately, I also don't know when I will have said energy. Believe me, I'm more upset about this than any of you are.

Hey everyone. Sorry things have been so quiet (too... quiet...) around here. I actually have stuff to talk about in Geas but I've been too busy with life, work, and other things (see below) to get a post together. I'll try for later this week.

But! This post is not just hollow words and empty promises. One of the things that has taken up my time was doing judging for the recent Verge game competition. I really liked all the entries (I know that sounds trite but it's true). You can see the results and downloads for the games at the main Verge site: http://www.verge-rpg.com/

Go play the games. Love them as I have loved them, and there will be joy.

Some new art. Tanessa has returned. I even added a speech portrait for her.

Download this week's alpha release of Geas!

Sorry about missing the update last night, and the relative lameness of this one. Hopefully I will feel better soon.

Discussion

I am quite happy with both the sprite and the portrait that I came up with for Tanessa. I finally dragged out my tablet rather than half-assing everything with a mouse. Hopefully I can continue to make good portraits in the future.