Holy shit, an update!?

Been slacking fo ra couple of months, uni, ludum dare (lol, 219th overall), and moving house. But I finally put some time into this. Done a massive code restructuring so that it's much easier for me to maintain as things get more complicated :) Anyway. I also added KEYS! basically, items can now interact with doors, so I can make things like keys, keycards, a crowbar that will open doors, a magic wand that turns into a pony when it opens a door. ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES!

19/08/2011 - Video Update

Just another video update. Entering Ludum Dare tonight so there may be even less by next week :(

13/08/2011

Added static items, that is items in the world that can't be picked up. These "props" can be used with items to produce new items. for example, Bread + Toaster = profit... and/or Toast

12/08/2011

Updates:

• Cursors now change
• Speech bubbles rather than the old notifications system
• a really poor title screen
• Can now talk to NPCS without being right on top of them :)

Improvements

The old notification system is now pretty much replaced with the Bubble system, since combat isn't really going to happen and those upwards moving damage notifications wont be used, things are now placed in a sort of speech bubble for easy reading. I may tweak this to make it slightly nicer looking in the future, but for now it works alright.

BREAD!

A couple of things

• The collision rects for doors and items are now based on the sprite size rather than an arbitrary one I decide upon, making things look a lot smoother when the cursor changes hovering over something although this needs some tweaking for the npc.
• Inventory Items can now be looked at, for a description. They can also be selected but not yet used.
• I have also decided that I will upload a new video every Sunday Friday showing off anything added each week / not shown in a previous video.

Inventory

Basic inventory works, BREAD. I also made a naff title screen just so it can act as a placeholder for when I implement some sort of menu!

Mouse movement

Decided to take a more traditional adventure game approach, and started working on the mouse interaction for movement. Next up interacting with doors and NPCs with the mouse. (and yes I am putting off proper NPC interaction at the moment ):

Returned

I have just been on holiday for 5 days and as such development has been lacking. While I was out however I scrawled down the basic idea for the NPC dialogue tree system which I will start implementing tonight. I have also been working a little on another game project too :)

Well well well...

Happy enough with this screen, maybe do some tweaks, but here is a small bathroom in a pub!
An improvement that I need to make is to let doors have different sprites as opposed to just the "regular" sprite used here at the moment :)

Plans

I plan on making a shiny looking walk through video of all the current working features in the game this weekend. Just as a sort of milestone and then I will probably remove all the billion development videos off youtube since it's just getting all over the place when a new video is added for small features and stick to screen shots on here and major videos every so often.

I am also resurrecting my old Toshiba m200 tablet pc for working on the graphics, hopefully it will be easier using a stylus rather then drawing it all on here. ps the graphics will still suck.

Working Features

This is by no means a definitive list as I have not really done much documentation until now. But should serve as a nice list and perhaps might inspire me to make a mini tech demo of all the stuff that is working so far :o

• Basic Enemies
• Initial code for NPCS
• Weather Broken due to the new levels not being based on 40x40 tiles
• doors
• on the 2d plane and allowing movement in the z axis too
• "Dark areas" 
• ladders!
• Permanence, corpses and blood spatter are saved between gaming sessions
• this will include player corpses too if one should die
• Level editor.
• Multi layers to levels, ie foreground
• Zombies are made up from random "parts" so that when created, each zombie will be made up of different head / body / legs and will make it look better then just a few different sprites for a zombie since they seem to be the focus of the game so far.

Coming soon, a list of things I want to implement / improve soon.

Door Sprites

Not yet made it to a video yet, but there are now sprites instead of rectangles for the doors.

Huzzah, a blog!

I have been working on this game on and off for a month or so now, and I thought I would get around to making a blog to write down thoughts and a place to dump videos or screen shots related to development!
There is a playlist of videos on youtube that has all current videos on here:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA7B5DE2F919CA58C