First things first. Now when I look for Star Frog Games or The Thief’s Tale I come up at the Top of the search results. About damn time considering the amount of content on this page and the fact that “Star Frog Games” was a crypto search once.
Anyway enough of that, over the weekend I started with finishing the user interface and the make the game a little more well put together. At this point the content isn’t going to suddenly expand like at the Beginning of Time, so now it’s all about polish and presentability. So this weekend I went ahead and installed a Pause Screen which allows the player to continue or quit and I’ll reuse the code for the front end screen too. I also went in and installed the 4 collectible dolls that populate the levels that I have.
Finally, I updated the GUI with new shiny Health and Dash Bars (which are smaller now too) and made some modifications to make the whole thing take up less screen space. I also made a tweak to make the GUI not appear if the character would stand in front of it. So it gets out of the way which I find really nice. Now it’s there when you want it but it’s never in the way, like a good GUI.
I did run into a problem though. The 4th Doll is hidden at the upper Right of a level. So if you just walked in and didn’t design the level you would have no idea that it was even up there, let alone how to get to it. So a small modification to the level and the doll placement and it’s good now.
-Also ran into a first level Environmental Bug. It’s the second and third screens. First, the ceiling doesn’t match, which does some, interesting things. Second, one of the platforms needs to be 10 pixels taller. This wouldn’t be an issue but I already told the Environment Artist that the first level was finished, so get started on art. I think I may cut a “feature” to fix the bug. Right now, when you climb it turns off the collision system (a bug I fixed last week). The unintended side effect of that is that now when climbing a short box you can press down to drop and stop climbing. Issue is that you can drop into another rectangle which, um, kills you. It kills like a 3 named presidential assassin (I’m looking at you David Hyde Pierce). So I think if I turn off the ability to drop down when climbing the problem will be fixed. Yeah, I’ll do that.
-I’m noticing that as the project continues the fixing of bugs requires a little more improvisation.
– What, no scripting you ask? Well, no. The reasons are two fold. I wanted to get the smaller things out of the way quickly, so I can focus on the scripting afterwards (like today). Other than that, I do not have characters yet. I don’t want to create scenes with characters that I might not have art for by the 15th. I’ll have a better idea tomorrow and can get that going ASAP. Like, the second (now 3rd and 4th) levels are written in the script to have skeletons in them. I can go ahead and create the scripting for those scenes, but I don’t know if the skeleton models and animations will be done in time. If it’s just Guards, then I have to rewrite the script for the demo. Argh.