10 Days of Work and Advances - Part 2

As my understanding of the code and language started to develop, I was able to jump through tutorials a lot faster. Rather than following each one absolutely step by step, I was able to take specific pieces of each tutorial and apply them to my own design and aims for the game. A quick look at a top down shooter tutorial gave me the tools to get my robe to use its magical powers:

I even added some glowing eyes just to make things more interesting. Adding projectiles really added a whole new feel to the game as I was able to play around with sound effects and different explosions. Surprisingly, my current enrollment in Calculus 2 finally showed to be useful in that it made me realize I could use the function of sin(x) to make my fireballs follow a slight up and down bobbing motion! Once again a huge step forward in the possibilities of the future plans for the game!

As these showier details developed, I decided to take on my next goal: animated and accurate status bars for the health and mana! This proved to be a very difficult and time consuming process, with a lot of curve balls and outside of the box thinking was required. Even the image file used for the sprites were somewhat strange, with the empty hp bar being finalized with a width of 160, and a height of a whopping 3200 pixels... Go figure. I was a little skeptical at the approach I was taking, but in the end some fairly advanced algorithms resulted in a successful production of an animated health bar!

This was one of the most frustrating part to code, and as I test ran the level the results never seemed to be the same. Sometimes the bar would just skip from 20% full up to 80% rather than sticking at 0 and then killing the monk, sometimes the animation would go hay-wire, it was definitely a good test of my patience. Luckily once things worked out it wasn't very difficult at all to swap things around a little bit to make a mana bar, which I soon followed up with an Used Interface. Things at this point seemed to really be flowing along smoothly.

Now I was ready to delve a little bit more into tile sets! I had made some grass and dirt tiles before, but as shown above, they were by no means very pretty to look at. The blockiness was still very prevalent, and I had not spent the time to add the necessary amount of tiles. I started out in a notebook to make sure I covered all the blocks, and ended up with a fairly basic tile set that looks like 

The purple of course is transparent, and I obviously left quite a bit of space to use later with more details added to the set. This definitely showed me the difficulty to make a good looking set, I even now still have a few pieces I need to polish up. Luckily having this did allow me to make a fairly game-realistic scene where I could test my robe out in a more real setting:

With a nice looping background, a fairly cool GUI (that I still can't decide on being final or not) and some more professional looking tile work, things were getting exciting. Running around like this AND shooting fireballs is quite a treat when you've built it all from the ground up.