Player Avatars

I’ve turned my attention to the UI for my cartoony RPG. Although I’m still not done working on the dungeon texturing, I realized I’ve been wasting too much time on those experiments. Rather than becoming mired on one thing, it’s much more productive to just move on with the rest of the game and come back to that later. Who knows, maybe I’ll end up commissioning an artist to make some new textures.

Anyway here’s how the UI looks so far (notice the player portrait and health/mana meters in the top corner):

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Algorithm for Aiming at a Moving Target

There are a couple old projects I recently realized aren’t visible anymore (because they were using old player technologies) so I decided to dust them off and do WebGL builds of them. I’ll talk about the other next month, but in this blog post I just want to focus on one, the demo of an algorithm I devised for aiming at a moving target. The interactive demo is on my space at itch.io:

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Game development quotes

Years ago I wrote down in my notes a great quote about game development. It was something said by Jerry Holkins, one of the co-creators of the comic, back when the first Penny Arcade game was coming out. The quote was great and that’s why I noted it down, but like a dummy I didn’t keep the source where I saw it. Well with the help of people online, I finally tracked it down!

Here’s a photo of the article (or rather, his sidebar to a longer article) in the August 2008 edition of Game Developer magazine:

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Common Interface for Actor Objects

This month there isn’t really anything visual that’s changed with my turn-based dungeon crawler. Instead, this past month has been a lot of invisible structural work. For example, there hadn’t been any way to complete a dungeon and start a new one, so I added in an end location to reach. Meanwhile, I’ve also been doing a lot of refactorings and code cleanup, one of which I want to highlight in this post.

Specifically, I created an interface for the various interactive objects to share. While it’s not where I learned of this programming construct, the following video is a pretty good explanation of what I did:

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