The teaser page has been updated with a bit more lively interface. I hope you like it, and especially the rearrangement of the main theme Forever No More. I wasn’t sure I should post it, but if a certain other well-known RPG company posts their game’s main theme on their site the day they announce it then maybe that’s not such a bad idea. Since it is the theme of the Shadowdawn series and used as a title theme it will be just a little different when the actual game is done, and hopefully mastered (a technique in sound I know little about but do have friends capable of it), so I don’t think I’m giving too much away 🙂
Let me begin the development update by saying in the days since I started programming Shadowdawn Genesis, I’ve definitely improved. When I need to use something I haven’t implemented, it’s a much easier task and I make very few mistakes for the compiler to cry about now, not to mention my code is getting easier to read and adjust as needed.
That said, this weekend was spent in the process of not just finishing enemy AI and general programming, I decided that the original class (that’s the “type” that defines what defines an enemies status and actions in code for you non-programmers) was not well done. It was slow, very hard to decipher where to change things and timers were being accessed all over the place so there was a very good chance that a major AI bug would occur when things got more complex. So I totally scrapped the entire thing (much like I did with the Level Map class earlier this week to avoid memory issues down the road).
One of the things I set out to do with the new NPC class (which now encompasses enemies, neutrals, and party members) which I had been avoiding since the start of the project was create a proper animation routine. The test kittris were just one frame, regardless of which way they were facing or what they were doing, and obviously I couldn’t let that be the case for the finished game. Amazingly the whole thing worked with no problems on the execution side the first time I ran it, from here I just need to start the master NPC/Enemy database which should be no problem (since I have a database already for items) and have the level data refer to them by an ID number for efficiency.
Which brings up the next thing, although I hate giving myself more work, I realized I don’t have a lot of enemies planned. Maybe that’s ok, but guess I still need more “neutrals” like birds that fly overhead of random fauna wandering the wilderness. Hopefully I’ll be smart enough to keep their actions to a minimum.
