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.