New Approach, New Hope

Well, hello peoples of the internet. I'm sure I get, on average, zero readers per month, but that's alright. If anyone does read this, know that I have once again started this project, and I mean to see it through to the end, even if that does take a long time.

The last time I did anything with this game, I was using a windowed screen, and a large image as the background my character and the NPCs moved on. Well, this has changed. After two days of experimentation, I have created a tiled map system that works. It looked to have a lot of tearing, but that was because I was using blocks with hard edges and angles as my map. Well, I replaced them with threes and grass, and the tearing is gone. Well, not gone, but the human eye has trouble seeing it. You can still see the tearing, but you'd have to be looking pretty damn hard, and know what you're looking for.

Right now that is all I have- a tiled map that shows the area immediately around the player (or the center of the screen, actually), and moves smoothly just like the GameBoy games. Also, I have implemented a new structure of programming that I learned for a fantastic book all about game programming in Java.

So, I have a little day trip planned for tomorrow, and I am beat for today (been programming for several hours straight today and yesterday, plus a chopped onion is making keeping my eyes open somewhat painful), but on Wednesday, the programming keeps going. I am going to be putting the main character in at the center of the screen.

I need to fix my arrow key scrolling (a method of keeping it from going haywire is also keeping me from scrolling continuously), and then I start on the character. I need to resize my character images (there are many images). Then I need to import them and store them. After that I need to make it so that I can turn in place (I completely forget how I managed that little gem in my old code). Then I can start. I believe I can readily use a value that determines the movement of the map as the basis for determining when the character takes his steps. But gah, my eyes hurt, and my brain hurts. No more thinking about programming right now.

I still have a story to make. And i am still deciding whether or not I will include the newest Pokemon from the DS games. That will add a certain amount of difficulty. That would mean male and females of Pokemon (which I was planning to do), but also characteristic differences. Plus, I don't know if anybody has yet calculated the stuff like experience gains and stuff. I need that to be well documented if I am going to program it into my game. Whatever.

Food time. Later, peoples.