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.

Like Dark Souls, I've decided I wanted to follow suit in how items are described, with bits of lore in them. In  the creation of those first few items, I started writing a few things in my new text file for the game's design called the Lore Bible.txt. This will contain any bits and pieces of lore about the game's world, it's inhabitants, and any possible fiction revolving around it. In the future when I have much more substantial Lore Bible, currently only have a few lines of text, I may make a post about it. I wouldn't want to go too in-depth as I don't want to put all the lore out there and want it to remain a mystery some. I very much like the approach Dark Souls takes with story telling by not shoving it in your face and only giving you bits and pieces here and there allowing for those interested in it to go exploring for it. Also, the nice thing about this approach is that you don't need to have too much detail for the world as you can intentionally leave things a bit vague and obfuscated to leave things up for interpretation, much like the real world with many events in our history.

I will now leave you with my current selection of armor icons, which coincidentally also look exactly like they do when drawn in the world on the character, as well as another screenshot.

Hopefully next time I post will be a bit sooner rather than later.

~ Rogue Templar