I spent a couple days playing around with Kyzrati's excellent
REXPaint art program, laying out some basic interface ideas and generally entertaining myself by drawing a couple fake screenshots of
Lunkheads Zero Release #219. I was going to use these to demonstrate where I think I'm going with this game before my impatience got the better of me and I just went back to programming. At least now I'm impatient to do something I actually want to talk about.
With a couple days work, I laid the groundwork for a menu system, starting at the player's Inventory. Then REXPaint got to my head and I went a little overboard.
Download:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/f4gy39dr68bi30b/Lunkheads%20Zero%20-%20%235.rarOnly new feature is the Inventory - press (I) to open it like every other game with an Inventory. The sidebar menu and main-window menu are both superfluous right now, but only because I haven't finished my idea for the sidebar and there's so few things to pick up. Also, the game looks a lot better with 10x10 tiles, but I'm not totally committed to it yet. Of course the far more obvious addition is the item descriptions, a feature that will surely become a millstone around my neck at some point in the future. I probably spent more time designing and implementing those two pictures than I did the Inventory menu code, and a plethora of items is only going to make it worse.
Implementing the pictures made me sit back and think about what exactly I want to accomplish with this project. The game that I ultimately want to make will be a fully graphical, real-time game, and if I was actually serious about it those sorts of operations should be the first thing I study, not making a fancy looking turn-based console game.
At first I just wanted the pictures because I thought it'd be a neat way of demonstrating what I have in mind, and they're easy if time consuming to make. But I remembered that even making a roguelike isn't my actual goal, I do really love roguelikes. It's certainly what I started learning how to program for, and from the day I sat down with MSDN and this forum, I was imagining a very graphically developed console game.
Out of all the roguelikes I've played, I think my all-around favorite (besides Dwarf Fortress naturally, in a category all its own) is Caves of Qud. On top of having a lot of content, it's a graphically busy and interesting game. All the bells and whistles don't change the gameplay in any way, but it's much more visually engaging than 16 color Codepage 437 graphics have a reason to be. And I always thought if I made a roguelike, I'd want to make something like that, a visually unique game. Which is why I've apparently wedded myself to the investment of fancy interfaces and a gallery of ASCII art for what's supposed to be an experimental game. Because I'm going to make a roguelike anyway just for the Hell of it, and if I'm going to make a roguelike it's damn well going to be the one I'd want to make.
That being said, all other art and whatnot from here to a while from now will probably be very basic. I've settled into a process of developing one piece of core functionality at a time, until eventually I have asomething with enough mechanics to be a genuine game, at which I'll start flexing my creative muscles and flesh out the content. I kinda have a bet with myself on far into the process I can get before I turn on the random number generator, at which point I'll consider it to be actually gamey. I suppose I should make a To Do list in the near future.
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Topic: Aqizzar makes a game (Read 15551 times)