Eli decided to gather some folks for a spring edition of #Decadv, I only just finished the proof-reading of No Bears None, I'm aching to do a bit of gamedev and I'm always willing to jump on an occasion that forces me to document things. So let's go!
I'm hoping to make a whole new implementation of Donsol with Rek's gorgeous new sprites. I'm tired of the NES look n' feel of our first implementation, I want something that has animations and effects and lives up to the capabilities of Varvara.
Starting more seriously on the interface now, I think I got everything down where I want it. Through all my years of programming in #Uxn, I've managed somehow to never learn much about emulating larger numbers and just lived within the boundaries of 16-bits, but I do skirt pretty close to the boundary sometimes. For example, if I want a little progress bar 0x32 pixels wide, to display a value between 0 and 0x15, I have to do a little bit of finessing to have enough resolution in a short to emulate what in other languages you'd use decimal points for.
"You drank the white mage"
There has got to be a better way to phrase the flavor text for top tier healing cards.
A day of implementing animation tools. The mileage on that little smoothing animation function.
We're putting final touches to the assets and gameplay. The game finally has fail/success ending screens and animation handlers for nearly every object drawn on the screen, it's beginning to feel juicy. We've inspired ourselves from our favourite Playdate games and tried to add all the little details that make these games feel alive. I think we're getting there, there's still a few effects to put in, a camera shake here and a particle effect there.
Working at the intersection of fully event-driven and catlang programing makes writing animation code so much fun, I hadn't fully understood why it felt so nice until I realized that it's the concatenative nature of the language that makes it possible to pause out of an event, and jump anywhere in the code to resume evaluation.
Tomorrow is already the last day of this edition of Marchember Adventure. What a glorious couple of days it's been, between boat maintenance, the sun shining, seeing friends and drinking plenty of water(!), I think we've managed to cobble together a gorgeous little 1-bit game.
My sixth day was some testing, some optimizing, lots of removing magic numbers, a bit of animating, spamming uxnlin donsol.tal, trying to crash the game, punching buttons during animations, picking the wrong cards, trying to die, trying to live, drinking too many potions; but yeah, I think, we've got a game on our hands, and a fun one at that. Tomorrow is hooking up audio systems, help pages and final touches.
All the game's systems are tested and working. I've written an automatic tester to help me find memory leaks, weird game states and made it play hundreds of games; all signals are green. Decadv is over, the game is done but we don't have a build, now I have to hook up sounds, soundtrack and start testing on the Playdate. But for now I'm signing out, 'til next December.
Devine Lu Linvega