Tactics!

Three months later, and I’m back.

Tactics is relevant again, I’ve been resorting code, making things less ugly, and adding functionality to the engine for almost a week now, which means I’m back!

First of all, what have I done up until a week ago?

I was working on graphics, getting polygons to rotate properly, and did it.
I released a working version of this, with a square, movement and rotation. (I was pretty proud of myself: I don’t care what anyone else thinks)Colors, scaling (i.e. zoom) and non-oblong shapes are all completely within the scope of the code I have made, but the point of the release was to test the one feature I had doubts about, not to show off the features I’m comfortable with.

Then I moved house and forgot about it until now. With school exams finished for the semester, I started programming last week, and I feel comfortable saying that I am back!

Since graphics are working, I’m changing the layout of the source, and creating a “game instance” class that will help separate the graphics, engine, and game from eachother, and then it will be work on actual game mechanics like entities and movement!

Exciting times.

So Now What

Short meta:

I have just finished py4school, and now I am on holidays. I should be getting back into my original projects soon, although it does depend on a few things…

Anyways, back to C++ is the point, particularly with Tactics, we’ll see what happens to Zombies.

See you in a few weeks.

Testing my Game

Not because I was worried about it not working, but because I have to.

Testing Procedures

Some browser-side zooming is recommended on that image.

The first test poses a number of battles of Frog versus Toad, to see who wins.

I am testing the defending advantage, then a neck-and-neck battle with a slight bias, and then a battle in which both sides can insta-kill. (falling back then, to the defender’s advantage)

The first test made me realize that I’d programmed a defender’s advantage when I was expecting an initiator’s advantage, but that is fine.

Once I knew how the advantage behaved the rest was fine.

Next I tested potions, which have been designed to provide three stat boosts, and all of the tests went as expected.

The algorithms are all being calculated as expected, and caps on health are functional as well.

“Lots of Potential”

I’m approaching completion of the program in terms of meeting criteria, with at least three quarters of the necessary algorithm made, it’s just a matter of:

  1. Creating enemies
  2. Creating item functionality
  3. Linking all gameplay elements to create a game out of the existing toys
  4. Content such as variety of items/effects, different enemies*
  5. A levelling thing?

*Beyond this it isn’t actually necessary so I doubt it will get done.

Things I have made recently:

  • World map
  • Functionality to look around local area
  • Ability to view inventory
  • Ability to collect nearby objects (in inventory)
  • Ability to move to objects in area.

Code Released here.

Actual Work

I’m actually making relevant code again;

I just made a simple battle system (that doesn’t bother to print its details…) that will quickly resolve who wins out of a pair with a seconds per attack and a damage per attack stat each.

I also made a pair of for loops to generate sets of strings that will give a scale map of the entire game world rather than just the current area.

This is important progress, as I am very consistently losing interest with this project….

Aaanyways.

I Take It Back

I’ve lost motivation and interest completely for the non-mandatory side of this assignment, soooooooo that’s embarrassing. I don’t know if I’ll ever run on a sudden desire to use Python in a few years: if I do then I may turn this base-assignment into a fun extradite game, but for now I’m making inventory and battle and victory and that is it.

The reason why is partly real life circumstances, and the rest has to do with me feeling too inspired with my long-term dream for me to want to develop this small idea; perhaps this makes me less reliable with my project commitment, but most of my blog content is theory and design, and that is unchanged whether or not I give up.

Progress

My work so far:

01_map

This screenshot shows some teaser code, and a demonstration of my ASCII map, with a rogue-like at-sign-character carelessly splashed across the map.

There are four commands so far:

  • move: randomly moves the player to a different coordinate on the region
  • travel [north | south | east | west]: changes the coordinates of the current region according to the direction specified
  • spawn: randomly places an asterisk on the map
  • exit: terminates the program