Heart Realm Update #009

Since the last update, I haven't had a lot of time to work on Heart Realm. I'm actively searching for work so that's been taking up a lot of my time.

This past week I've focused on reworking how data is imported into the game. I was using XML files to store all the necessary attributes of the various item/equipment types and enemy types but figured it was unnecessary to store any redundant data of similar objects. For example, there's no point in having multiple data objects of two similar Goblin enemy types when I could just make one Goblin base then create variations off that, inheriting all it's parent's attributes and simply changing whatever I need. Here's an example of what I mean:

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.