Heart Realm Update #011

Since the last update I have finished the first version of the character screen. The purpose of this screen is to display the player character's stats, equipment, etc. as well as allow the player to distribute stat points that they receive upon advancing in character level. Obviously all User Interface stuff is temporary and will be updated throughout the development of this game. This current version is fine for getting it's point across.

Heart Realm Update #010

I recently got back into working on Heart Realm after having been away from it for about a month or so. I had been working on another project which I started with the intent of it being a short term project, as in I don't plan on working on it as long as Heart Realm and would hope to finish it in a much shorter time.

Since the last update I had worked out how I would go about implementing Lua scripting into the game. I came across a Java library called LuaJava which I had some trouble implementing due to some compatibility issues. Turns out it was just something stupid. The .dll and .jar files were compiled to run with a 32-bit JRE, and I was running a 64-bit JRE. My initial solution was to run the make files provided with the source of LuaJava to make a 64-bit version, but I had no luck. I then realized that the problem was in fact the JRE version I was using being 64-bit. I had the 32-bit version on my computer but was not using, for some reason, so I switched the project over to using the 32-bit JRE and now it's all good.

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 #008

It's been a while... let's just leave it at that. Quite a bit has changed for Heart Realm since I've posted last; a change of location for one (in real life), change of job (had one, now I don't and I'm looking). Personal stuff aside, I've been working on this game on and off for the past few months so there's been a bit of change since I've last posted.

One major new thing is the inventory menu, it's very simple at the moment and don't want to go too complex with it at the moment.

Heart Realm Update #007

It's been a while since I've posted an update. First off, I started working on a board game version of one of my other games at the beginning of June. Then in June I started a second job so I was working two jobs and figured it'd better to spend my time developing a board game in the little amount free time I had so I continued doing that for a little while. Last week was when I finished working at my previous job so now I'm just working one job and so I have more free time to develop. Since I have more free time I continued working on Heart Realm.

For the past week or so I worked on a few things. For starters I worked on line-of-sight based vision where it basically just blacks out anything outside the player's line of sight where objects can block the sight. Currently it's in an early stage so the game does take a little bit of a performance hit. The game doesn't run really slow or anything, but there's definitely a big difference in performance with it compared to without it.

Heart Realm Update #005

So it's been two weeks since the last post, I just never got around to posting earlier because I felt that the progress I made wasn't worth posting about too much as it wasn't too glamorous.

Over the past two weeks I've been working on ways to implement enemy mobs and some of the various things associated with them.

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.