Thinking

I've had a lot of web development work lately, but I've still been doing a bit of programming and I think I'm taking the wrong approach with this engine.

Why?

Because there's nothing incredibly special or unique about this engine and it's not going to create anything special or unique in many peoples hands even mine.

I've been looking at old dos games since I grew up playing them and for me graphics are a weird thing, it's awesome having shiny graphics but all the work on them detracts from the main point of making a good game for me.

Sure the graphics wouldn't be great in this isometric engine but I think it would be too much work to make isometric graphics for a game and I wouldn't spend enough time on what mattered: game play and reviving peoples imagination.

With simple graphics and a lot of textual content I feel so much more, connected and amerced in the game; with great graphics I look at it for a while then get sick of the non-existent game play.

To really make my engine, I think I'm going to start with simple and slow 2d top-down tile based graphics and put a lot more effort in to the text and game play, the graphics will be the last thing on my mind.

Zomg no updates?!

Well yeah, sorry <_<

I have been pretty busy with web development work, like ridiculously busy. It's good in some ways but not in others!

Anyways double buffering is working so I can do smooth scrolling for walking etc now!

It's quite a big leap as it means I had to put in a game loop as well, no screen shots to show as you can't see it unless you're playing with it!

Fun fun fun

Okay, so I faced up to the fact that I was just prototyping and today all I've done is some basic refactoring and tried to get double buffering to work properly. 

No screenshots, but I can safely say the engine is now working again, now the next steps might take a while as they aren't the easiest.

Update

Now I have the ability to add tiles at any size / height and it will automatically put them in the right place on the grid. Here's that:

More progress!

So today I sat down for a while working out all my algorithms, then I realised that since I asked my brother a few things he started writing them too, so we both got some good algorithms for drawing the tiles properly!

From there I did quite a lot, the engine now:

1. Loads maps, can save them easily too
2. Has a z index

Here's the features of the map so far:

1. As many tiles as you want on a single map, it will always draw them correctly due to special sorting I've done ;)
2. Support for multiple Z levels, so you can have a little house with a roof that you can walk under without being warped etc
3. Walls etc can be added and will automatically block because of their height!

So, pretty busy today and this is alot of progress for something like this: Here's another LAME screenshot! It shows different heights, different tiles on the map too.

What I've done tonight

Well I got home tonight and realised I didn't actually have the code, so I restarted it in Visual C# Express 2005, NO CODE EXPLORER!!! That was a little getting used to!

Anyways so far I have:

1. Deserialises graphic object from an xml file (just add graphics easily to a simple xml file)
   
2. Draws tiles specified by an index
   
3. Supports Z index as well

Here's a crappy shot of what it does so far:

Not much to see unfortunately!

Here's what it loads the graphics from:




So what's next?

1. Simple configuration
   
2. Loading from map files
   
3. A character
   
4. Map scrolling
5. Directional blocking