Sometimes a rest is good.

I know I hadn't really started on my game, but a collision problem I was having with the players movements in jumping from building to building had got me stumped and due to being busy with work and having a cold which seemed to not go away, all this de-motivated me, and as you can see from the date of my last post, I didn't touch my game for about two weeks.

But after watching some movies based on comic book heroes, today I decided to jump back in and my god, I solved the collision problems in an hour, it also seemed so simple today, that I don't know how I didn't fix it before.

So, I guess it's true, sometimes if your lacking in ideas, it's best to have a good rest and totally forget about it, so you can come back fresh faced and with a fresh outlook.

Player Movement/collision

Ok, I've started creating the player movements and collision detection today.
It's been a bit of trial and error, as I've never created a platform game before (well except in gamemaker or klick & play).

I've spent a few hours working on this and had some hair-pulling moments such as working out the stupid errors I had made in my code that meant either the player sometimes was half in a wall, or on some blocks the player floated just above the ground when walking and others he walked perfectly. But, I managed to solve these (hopefully)

As for now, the player now moves left, right, jumps and falls down if he walks of the side of a block or building. The code for this is pretty basic, but it works okay for the moment, and I'll come back to it at another time and improve it and also add new movements.

I'm very happy with my switch to glbasic at the moment, and the movement I've programmed is a lot better than the movement I managed on blitzmax in about the same time.

GLBasic

I've recently been playing around with a few different programming languages and frameworks/engines such as java and slick, and some basic variants such as playbasic, blitzmax, and I've decided to switch to glbasic.

I really like the cross-platform capabilities of glbasic (Windows, Linux, OS X, iPhone, Windows Mobile, GP2X/Wiz, and for a bedroom coder like me, who's main aim is to actually finish a game, this would be a great help. It's also a basic variant so similar to Blitz3D/Max which I already know a little bit of.




Sion

Created a weather engine

Today, I haven't had much time to get into any serious programming, so I used the little time I had to try some not so important stuff in the game. So today, I created a simple weather engine, that can be used to create snow and rain effects (and maybe more to be added) for the game. It works quite well, and will definitely look better with some nicer rain and snow graphics.

I've also used the time to change tiny bits of code to make them either more efficient or more readable, which I like to do when I only have half an hour free to do programming.

Level-Editor

Well since I've got home from work (10:00pm), I've spent the night working on the level editor. It's now 02:12

It works a lot better now.
I've added the ability to create a new level with the user selecting the width and height of the level before they create it.
Also, I've added the ability to load and save to different files before starting and during the level editor running.

My level editor code is extremely messy, and unorganized, but I'm not to bothered about this, as it only consists of two files. It's the game that needs to be neat and organized and so far the basics framework I've started for it is.

gravity works! game codename: in darkness...

It's only a couple of minutes since the previous post, but I'm quite happy with the simple physics and gravity I've implemented. Basically, I've created a character class, and have given the man basic movement and gravity, so he can currently move, jump and will fall if he go's off the building.

Level editor

Ok, I've had a bit of a busy week, with preparing my students in my real job for exams, so I haven't had much time to work on the game.

But what I have done, is re-written the level editor slightly, and created some temporary tiles and stolen a character graphic from another game just for temporary purposes to see what the game could look like.

Here is a screenshot of the current progress, showing a character falling from the sky (as there is no collision detection yet) and the tilemap working