Dev Time

Back home in Chicago for winter break and doing a bit of dev work. I’m working at the same iPhone Development firm I have been for the last couple years for the few weeks of break. I’ve been meaning to work more on the Octopus recently, I just can’t seem to find any motivation. Was catching up on lack of sleep and stress from finals this weekend, and now regular work has started. Hopefully will find motivation soon.

I’ve been thinking of making a level editor, it would be something new and cool to work on and could be helpful to extend the play-length of the game (yay 2 levels so far). But that may just be procrastinating from adding new things into the game itself. I guess part of the problem is while the game is kinda fun to play, I don’t really enjoy it. It isn’t nearly as enjoyable as I want it to be. I do have some highly reusable code so I may scrap the current gameplay and start over, but i don’t know if that’s a better idea. I know on the one hand sticking to it is good, but there’s no point working on a game you don’t like as it won’t be enjoyable. Or I could just be being lazy and making excuses :P. I’m looking forward to having some more time as break continues.

So, the school portion of my game is now complete! Four weeks of pretty steady work does not, unfortunately, yield a complete game to me, but I think I have a pretty good start and a lot of code that I can work from. Luckily early weeks I spent on making reusable classes like my Image class (which wraps the Texture2D class) for drawing images easily and efficiently, an Animation class to hold any sprite animations I have, and others. The past two weeks, Thanksgiving break included, have been spent working on the Entities of the game (player, enemies, objects), and collision detection. My collision is still a bit ugly, but I can work on that more. I do however have Keys the player can pick up, which can open chests or doors. (An idea I came up with while designing the levels, is not to let the player have enough keys to open all doors/chests, so trial and error is required to find the best routes). Portals transfer the user to another level. All level objects/enemies are defined in the map file, and there’s even a simple menu. Overall, I’m excited to have some time over winter break to work on the game with the base I have right now. And of course, more screenshots!