Not much interesting to report on the front of Lichen. I'm in the process of switching over to an actual UI handling system instead of just half-assedly waving my hands at the problem with calls during HookRetrace. It will be better but right now it actually appears to be less functional than last week.
Oh well, such is how it goes I suppose.
I have been stalling out in my attempts to move forward with the compiler. It's frustrating and messy and I've been having little energy for it lately. So, I decided to shift my focus onto something more fun for now.
When I decided to put Geas on hiatus for a while, I mentioned I was going to work on some shorter projects. VCLua turned out to be the first one, but it took quite a bit longer than I anticipated (which is silly, I should have been less oblivious to the size of the task, but anyway). Really though, what I meant was small games.
So, I decided I would finally work on the game that's been brewing in my head for a while now: "Courage". It is related to Geas: it's going to fill in the backstory for Omen. Omen is in Journey to Black Mountain, and stars as Kiel's useless stupid friend. In Geas, he is a great-sword fighter working as a soldier in the ranks of the Mar Knights, and squired to Sir Athwin, one of the Knights' most prodigious soldiers and Captain of the Watch. That's a pretty big jump, and the story of what happened in the five intervening years is pretty important to Omen as a character, but I was mostly going to just handle it through dialogue and cutscenes during Geas. (Geas opens with Kiel and Tanessa embarking on a trip to visit Omen in Mar City.)
When I decided I needed a smaller game to work on though, I felt that I still wanted to do an RPG. This helps me solidify systems and build up a library of useful code for Geas. I like the idea of fleshing out the backstory of the various characters in Geas, and I felt that the gap between Omen from Black Mountain and the Omen in Geas was kind of odd if you don't have the whole story, so this felt like a natural choice. It's going to run from the point that Omen leaves Shoda's Brook (heroically running away in the middle of the night while telling no one but Kiel) through the point that he becomes Athwin's squire. This is the formative time for his "transformation", so it's the important bit.
Anyway, I set off to get started and hit a big snag: Maped3 wouldn't run on my computer. I upgraded to Windows 7 last year and, while I'd heard that people had problems with ME3 in Vista, I didn't think they existed in 7. I was wrong, it turns out! (Edit: But not really. See the comments on this post.)
So my other new project, which is going to take front-and-center for the time being, is called "Lichen", and it's a map editor that I'm writing within the Verge engine. I'm taking a lot of cues from Maped2 since Grue won't shut up stop waxing poetic about it. I've been meaning to do this for some time anyway since it will mean we finally have a working map editor for any platform that supports the Verge runtime.
I've only gotten a few evenings or so into it, but here's what it's looking like so far.
Lichen is not terribly functional at the moment, but if you want to play around with it for the moment, go check it out on github: https://github.com/speveril/lichen. If you have any requests, suggestions, whatever, let me know.
I had a particularly unproductive week and weekend. I intended to have VClua working with a handful of demos, and to have the first chunk of code set up on my first flixel project.
Unfortunately, I only managed to get VClua working with one demo -- Demon Lord Adventure I -- and then in the process of getting it working with the second target demo, I've broken it. It won't compile DLA1 anymore, and when it tries to compile my other demo it actually gets itself into an infinite loop spitting out Lua code. Eventually (after several minutes) it runs out of memory and crashes. Hyuu.
And I didn't get to my flixel game at all.
Good times in Gruedorf. I'll have something better next week.
Edit (~10 minutes later): Okay, guess I just needed to get that out of my system. A few minutes of looking at VCLua fixed the problem so that it now works with DLA1 again. My crappy space shooter demo that I dug up somewhere is still doing the infinite loop thing, but at least I'm not worse off than I was before.
Most of the changes that have happened have just been miscellaneous bug fixes. One biggish change I made was to the tokenizer though; the tokenizer will now (usually) look for the token you're asking for specifically, rather than looking for any token that it can. Honestly I'm not sure why I did it that way to begin with.
Since there was actually progress, I updated the git repo. https://github.com/speveril/VCLua, as usual.
So, I've done the final stretch on what I think of as "blind implementation" for VCLua. I was writing small little test programs to try out each feature as I added it, but I hadn't yet done any trials on bigger, actual games that I know run on the VergeC VM.
To quickly sum up, I've added...
So with that stuff done, I've moved on to actually testing out support for using this within Verge. I set my sites, to begin with, on Demon Lord Adventure, a tutorial written by Glambourine a while back. It's small and simple, so it's a good place for me to start.
Unsurprisingly, it didn't run right away. It didn't take me too long to iron out the immediate bugs, though, and before long I had it actually running! ... Until it needed to load the map. I completely neglected to take into account the fact that the maps need to load VC code as well. Anyway, a quick work around there, and the map is loading. Now I need to deal with v3's builtin structs, like curmap and entity. I thought this might just work, but I was wrong.
In any case, things are looking good so far, so I'm optimistic that I'll be able to wrap this project up by the end of January. You can check out my progress over at github, https://github.com/speveril/VCLua.
I've already started concept work on my first game for the year. Don't have a lot to say about it other than it will be Flixel-based game (so, in Flash) with an actiony Zelda-style gameplay, and I'm working on it with at least one other dude, possibly two. I'll have more to talk about on that in the coming weeks. I've also been mentally churning away on ideas for a second game, which I will probably be starting in tandem with this one, and working on solo. It will be a short RPG built in Verge, probably with the VCLua as a way to exercise it.
Have a good one!
On the VCLua front, two new big things: actual preprocessor support (#includes and #defines, and also #undef for good measure) and bit-wise operators. Also, in an under-the-hood change, I changed my straight up naive recursive-descent parser to a packrat parser. You can read more about those elsewhere, but the bottom line is that it is an order of magnitude (or two) faster. I've worked on a few other things but they aren't working completely yet, so they aren't pushed up to github.
You can check out my current work-in-progress at https://github.com/speveril/VCLua.
Aside from that, a new year started. Hooray and all that, I suppose. As cliché as it is, I find myself getting unnecessarily introspective around the new year. I take time off so I have more time to think, and I often end up visiting my parents -- being in the place that I grew up always fills me with a mix of nostalgia, introspection, and unrest.
Anyway, a few weeks ago when this was beginning again, I came to a decision about 2011. Historically speaking I am terrible at finishing the games I start, and sometimes I'm terrible about starting them at all. I'm sick of this. As soon as I finish VClua (which should be soon; it's very close to being usable and I'm getting pretty tired of it), I am going to throw myself at my goal for the year:
I will make and complete at least six games in 2011.
Six games is a laughably small number when I look at the output of more seasoned indies, but it's more than the total number of completed games that I've produced to date. I figure that for me at the moment, it is a tough but achievable goal. And I mean it when I say "at least"; if I finish six games before the year is out I won't rest on my laurels. I'll make more and then take it as a sign to set my goal number higher for 2012. On the other hand, I am fully aware that I may find myself needing to make four Ludum Dare-style 48 hour games next December. We'll see what happens.
It is questionable whether any of these games will be Geas. I'm certainly not abandoning Geas, but I have been strongly considering working on smaller side games before jumping back onto that train so I can get better and faster at making games and art, so I can get a few finished projects under my belt and out there, and so I can try out some of the systems and ideas I've got for Geas in a smaller testbed.
I've already drummed up a few handfuls of ideas, so I'm going to be sorting through them and deciding which are best, and what order I'd like to work on them. I should have something to say about my first project(s) in the next couple of weeks.
So anyone interested in taking up this challenge and making 2011 a 6+ game year with me?