The Best Tools are those that You Create Yourself

The topic for today's Screenshot Saturday over at r/gamedev, is to show screenshots of the development tools that you are using in your project. I figured now would be a good time to address some of that action, since I haven't covered it here yet

Promotional Video 001

The other week I had a play with software called CamStudio, and determined it was very useful for recording game demos. I've thrown this one up on Youtube:

It's not a fantastic production, but it's great to have something at least that I can show people other than a handful of screenshots

Tarvos

Status report

Quite a fairly significant change - the game world is now persistent per-load of the Applet. This means that when you drop a block, kill a creature, talk to an NPC, etc - those changes stick even when you move to a different chunk and come back.

Tarvos

Status report

Huge, huge, huge updates. Context Menu system is in - some items when used will now open a menu to allow selections from different options. Also, coded in Global Play, which is the use of multiple megachunk/chunk files arranged into a much, much larger map (theoretically infinite). When you are detected to be outside the rectangle of your current chunk, the code checks whether you should be moved to the next one. BAM.

Tarvos

Status report

Significant improvements - more things have been shipped out to external files rather than being hardcoded. There is now a levels.dat which lists the levels as chunk/megachunk files and represents the playing order. Background colours have been implemented - the Mage's tower now has a light(er) blue for daytime, etc.

Deploy test success

I just deployed the latest test build to this server, and things seem to be doing quite well - haven't checked it with chrome yet, but Firefox worked just fine. This is very, very happymaking.

Bringing the engine back together

After breaking the actual game in order to create the editor for Tarvos, I've finally started to put it back together again. Part of this required me to create a file that I've arbitrarily called levels.dat. This name, is, unfortunately, hardcoded.

When the Player presses the start key, levels.dat is read in, and processed - it contains simply, a list of level files, a description (in case I use it later), and the level number of the file. My current levels.dat is as follows:

Major Overhaul

I've been meaning to look at the Overlay for Tarvos for a while - it still said 'KEY' for the item box, which was a legacy thing from the first demo I put up a few months back. I've been thinking about this for a while, and have finally implemented a new interface.

Lemme know what you think:

A reasonably powerful feature

Sprites in Tarvos now have a @Useable boolean flag, which denotes that they may react if the player presses the secondary fire key (currently set to 'p') and is intersecting with them. This can be used to allow the player to open chests, doors, etc....
This is the main reason why this thrills me:

Because now, in my Throne Room chunk file, the player can walk up to the throne and actually SIT DOWN. Bam

Tarvos

Status report