A few hours late, but whatever. Here’s the second installment of the “weekly game update” for Hero Dude.
Accomplished
- Designed and updated tile graphics, however, I am now leaning towards scrapping all the current tiles and redoing them. I’m trying to get a graphic style that I can stick to for the rest of the game. The same goes for the design of Hero Dude himself – I’m still trying to get that right.
- Designed and added a quick HUD to the game. Look’s good so far.
- Drew up a plan for the entirety of world 1 (which encompasses about 4,000 x 1,400 pixels in size).
To-Do
- Need to optimize loading times. As it stands, loading level 1 takes roughly 15 – 20 seconds which is unacceptable. Attempting to understand how to utilize ByteArrays to convert the XML to a speedier format to parse.
- Create tiles and graphical assets for the World 1 plan I drew up. Build the level completely (at least with tiles, not necessarily objects such as characters, etc…)
Planning Ahead
Same as last week, no changes.
- Need to figure out how I’m going to go about collision detection. The two possibilities are either 100% tile-based, which will work in most cases. However, with this method, detecting collisions between enemies and moving platforms will be difficult. The other possibility is 100% SAT (Separating Axis Theorem) collision detection. With this method, I completely understand how to detect collisions, however, I don’t yet understand how to resolve the collisions appropriately.
Not bad being that I didn’t work on the game at all until yesterday / today. College is starting to throw everything it’s got at me being that there’s roughly 1 month left until the end of the semester. I actually set aside time on Friday to start and complete two different 4-5 page papers that aren’t even due until May. Why? Because they were just weighing me down and constantly on my mind. Feels good to have that out of the way.
Here’s a screenshot of the World 1 plan I just drew up. Take a look to get the basic idea of level 1.
That’s all for now. Tune in next week for more amazing news!
