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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.

My face, head, and most of the rest of my body all hurt. I've had a cold for the last few days and just don't have it in me to make a proper post. I'll get one up tomorrow.

Finished up the art for the blacksmith's, and made a sprite for him as well.

Download this week's Geas alpha!

The quest system will now exhort you to visit the blacksmith.

Discussion

Things are crazy busy leading up to Christmas. My plan is to use the Christmas break as a way to get some good work in on Geas. Unfortunately, I'm also moving at the end of January so I need to be getting packing. Hooray. We'll see how it goes.

A little bit of new art and map stuff.

Download this week's Geas alpha!

Check out the blacksmith's. This is somewhat southeast of your starting position, and has a sign with a hammer on it over the door.

Discussion

Blargh. Tired.

I would have liked to get more done but this weekend was busy and I ended up wasting a bunch of time on map editors. When I accidentally clicked outside the map area in maped3 with the flood fill tool and it crashed, I figured it was time to try out Maped Prime. Prime is cool ... but Ioachim seems to have (temporarily I hope) taken out the copy/paste tool. I use this tool extensively so it sort of rendered it a pointless exercise for me. Toss in some extra time thinking I had to compile it myself and having an incompatible version of Visual Studio and you have me not getting around to actually working on Geas until late.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of my compatriot, Jesse, I've gotten my hands on an up to date version of the Verge engine for Mac OS X. I've included it on the Geas Downloads page with some instructions on how to use it.

Enjoy!

Added a menu system and a journal/quest tracking system.

Download this week's Geas alpha!

Hit Esc to open the menu. Cancel (Z) will close any open menu. Use Confirm (X) to confirm choices and to examine/check/talk to things. Eventually these will be configurable but I hope it's not too arduous to use this layout for now.

Discussion

There are a few graphical glitches in there (the background when you have the journal open, for instance). I tossed in a dumb effect when the main menu is open just to see how well it worked (it worked just fine). Watch the background and you'll see it sort of start to blur and distort.

Anyway I'm fairly fond of the menu system. Distinct menus are defined as .menu files in res/menus, which are actually just Lua files that return a table. The table is used as a blueprint in constructing the menus. It's fairly flexible and I like how it works. Which is good (since I built it and I am going to have to use it or replace it)!

Since I've gone ahead and built the menu system using the current, in-place object prototype version of the code, I'll probably end up sticking with it. I don't especially want to go back and fix everything at the end. But hey, maybe I'll want to when I get to that point.

That said, I'm still not sure what I plan to do with vkLua in the long run. I guess I'll figure it out once I've put more time into Geas and the library is more mature. I'll try not to worry about it right now because no matter what I do there will be plenty of refactoring and code cleaning to do later. I can decide then whether I want to turn it loose onto the general Verge populace or direct people to use something else.

Last but not least, if you happen to only read my site because you come here via Twitter updates or something like that, then you should really check out the main Gruedorf page. There is some quality stuff happening there right now, so you'll be missing out if you don't take a look.

Finished the female villager. She and the male villager now follow you around, watching your every move.

Download this week's Geas alpha!

Sorry guys, I meant to get more map art done as well but I got a late start and my weekend was more unproductive than a ... thing that is very unproductive.

Discussion

Still no final decisions on my code woes from last week. It is almost always appealing to me to rewrite something from scratch but I am trying to be very good and do that as little as possible.

Hey, I just discovered half a glass of water here. I should drink it.

Anyway, I have also been reading a bit lately over at The Brainy Gamer. Since my post is uninteresting and boring this week, you should go read those articles instead. Especially if you are interested in game development yourself.

Also, hey, does anyone know of a video screen capture program that is a) free and b) doesn't put watermarks on the video and c) doesn't suck? I realize that's a tall order but please let me know if you're aware of any such project.