Stu's Rusty Bucket

Fishguts I : The GP2x compo

Hmm the 2007 compo has been announced and ends in two months. It would be nice to have fishguts in the compo (and renamed from its codename Fishguts to a real working title name). An artificial deadline might be a good thing to drive me toward finishing it…

Not that I believe I will have it all done in two months, as testing will be the killer hard part, and if you said a month of solid testing, that’s leaves only 1 month of coding, so I pretty much know its not going to happen.

as an aside, I tweaked the dev version with different tvout sizes. As the game engine can already handle different sized screens everything worked fine except the title graphics, which are still in 320x240 size appeared in the upper left corners, well its an easy fix to centre it, and I don’t expect many people to play it on the TV but you never know.

In my lunch hour today I may modify my cellular automata map generator and have it pump out all my maps so I can cross another thing off.

Ive got my minimal skill system in on paper, levelling up and hitpoint algorithms in a spreadsheet. Will probably in the next day or so balance the monster stats into the spreadsheet to level them off against the player stats and weapon stats.

This weeks agenda (if possible)

• Generate a plethora of maps (easy)
• Define complete list of game items (easy)
• Define monster list
• Name all towns and plot towns on map.
• Define magic spell list and think of best way to integrate it into gp2x interface (menu list vs multi button tap)
• Write some menu routines

Ive been thinking more about bring the FOV down to X number of squares in a dungeon when no light source is available and on a GP2X it doesn’t work so well because the screen is so small to start with… so I may forgo light sources and darkness in dungeons… I need to test a couple of ideas before I fully junk it.

Right now I think the GP2X gives me 13x9 in tiles, so working fov of 3 would give me 7x7 circle mm.. 2 would be 5x5 circle. I may just pixelate some light source instead of tiling it.