Heart Realm Update #004

This past week's focus has been on getting weapons into the game. Like the previous update where I focused on importing armor items into the game, I did the same this week but with weapons. Weapons were a little different in that I also had to come up with a way to import animations and store them in memory while the game was running.

So far I've got a data set of armor, weapons, and animations as far as content that I've loaded via XML files and stored for easy access during run-time. Like the armor, I also had an overlay on the player's sprite for the weapon. Unlike the armor, the weapon overlay also animates with the body, while the armor overlays are just a single frame, though that may change as I introduce more animations for the player. Other than that weapon importing wasn't too bad as I had the armor importing as reference so not too much extra work.

Heart Realm Update #003

Another week has gone by some progress has been made. This past week or so I've focused mainly on ways to import data files, particularly for the armor item types. I initially tried just trying to create my own format in a text format, but ended up just using XML as it was what I was most comfortable with. The first thing I did once I actually got the data files working was create a few pieces of armor to mess around with. I constructed a few basic pieces of armor with all the necessary stats that I knew a piece of armor could have. I added in a way to also attach sprites for both the icon which you would see in the inventory and other menus, as well as the sprite that would sit on top of the character's sprite, drawn in the world, if applicable.

While these sort of additions weren't all that particularly new from a player's perspective, they are necessary to the game's overall structure and will allow for actual content to be made in addition to just art assets and maps.

Heart Realm Day 4... 5? I Don't Know What Day It Is. I'll Just Start Labeling These As Updates Instead. Update #002

So it's been a week since I last posted anything in the subject of Heart Realm. To be honest I was going to, except I felt that the progress I made over the past few days of actually working on the game wasn't too significant. It turns out trying to program while watching various youtube videos or movies on the second monitor can sometimes be distracting. Despite the distractions, I still spent a decent amount of time programming a bit and drawing a few sprites.

The reason there wasn't a post earlier was simple, there wasn't much visible progress. I pretty much spent the past few days laying out the Character, Item, Weapon, and Armor classes that are used for handling the player's stats and the various item types, respectively. Basically I felt it was too boring to really talk too much about as one day I spent just creating a few of those classes and naming some variables, that's it. Aside from that I also worked out how I'd like to handle the weapons in the game. Like many new designers, or just a lot of designers in general I suppose, I took inspiration from one of my favorite games, Dark Souls. I decided I wanted the weapons to work in a mix between Dark Souls and Dungeons & Dragons; version 4.0, I'm not too familiar with older versions as I've never really played D&D in general, plus the weapons are more straight-forward in 4.0 compared to 3.5 I believe.

Heart Realm Day 01

While this may say Day 1, it's technically Day 3 or 4 of development. I started writing down the concept of the game the other day, but didn't actually start programming or anything until today. So, the game, as of right now, is called Heart Realm as you'll start off in this single hub type place and be transported to other various locations and dungeons which will primarily being procedurally-generated as most Rogue-Like games do. I decided to go with the name "Heart Realm" because you will always have this central hub-type realm you visit for shops and whatnot and can transport yourself to various locations via portals or whatever. I'm not 100% sure of all the details of the game. As far as the character goes, I'm also not entirely sure what I want to do, but from what I've decided so far is that you will play a generic player character which as you proceed through the game will evolve in whatever way you may see fit through the equipment, attributes, and spells you build into this character.

New Project And Happy Fun Time

Since it's been a while since I've last posted here, I figured it'd be a good idea to post something of this sort. Reason it's been so long since last post? I just forgot to come back, really. I'm not one for writing something frequently, I tend to write longer essays than shorter blurbs. That being said, I've started and put on hold many projects since I've last posted here.

One of my more recent projects being a local multi-player game where you and another player build a team from a list of fantasy units and fight it out in 2D, turn-based combat, similar to the Gameboy: Advance game Advance Wars, minus the building/conquering. It had a decent variety of units, some ~25 units (planned out twice that) with their own pros/cons and castable spells and abilities. The game was planned to be made in a month for a little challenge I wanted to try out called OneGameAMonth. I ended up continually coming up with more and more units so I decided to extend the length of development an extra couple weeks to accommodate it and as a result I held off finishing it within that first month. Ultimately I spent maybe 5-6 weeks on it. There are plenty of things I would like to go back and change or add, but that's for another time, for now I'll just stick to what I started today.