So with an absolute lack of time to make any kind of forward progress until we all get settled into the routine of the new house, things are taking a little sidetrack from the ‘milestone milestone go go go!’ mentality for a bit.

That means two things.
1.  Character sketches, concept art and little paper mockups. Ie anything I can do not in front of the development pc.
2.  Tools development.  Little things that I know I will be needing, but don’t need to be dependant on the whole application to function.  Things like getting http://editor.irismel.com to export maps and support the little things I will need in my map editor, like monster spawners etc etc.  Also all the little widgets (button classes, text dialogs and so forth) and asset & option managers that I plan on eventually releasing
as a standalone jar file to help other java Slick developers.  I’ve got the javadoc of what I have so far up at iristool.irismel.com.

So lots of little things but no real time to sink deep into the development mindset for now.  But I should have some pretty pictures and scribbles up before too long.

Yesterday was a down right beating and tonight is pretty much just simple recovery.

I got some basic Tool Tips in place for the various pc heroes health bars ,functions to manage and intialize them  and some general cleanup and organization of the whole game and level initialization process.

You know, it is kinda odd how many game tutorials, engine demos, books on programming etc etc that totally ignore the fundamental importance of getting the foundation right.  The basic core logic, update loop, memory management, debugging, maintaining player data integrity and all those un-glorious details even though utterly essential get just a few words here or there.   The best book I’ve found that goes into all those nitty gritty details is this Game Coding Complete,  By Mike McShaffry.. some of the content is out of date ,but oh my god .. it covers all the icky dull essential things that you NEED to know. [edit.. I only have the 1st edition.. he's now on the 3rd]

Now a Lot of us are using 3rd party engines these days… (‘Im using TGB, Slick and flash mainly) .. and it’s easy to shrug it off thinking that it’s ok to rely on the engine to make the decisions about all the nitty gritty and dull as hell details.. and for the most part you’d be right.  However….  When it breaks, or you push it too far, or you try and do something ‘not according to best practices’  and you’re lucky enough to have access to the source (thanks GarageGames and Coke&Code!) you can understand HOW it works and how you want it to work and arrive at a functional compromise.

Anyway I’m straying from the topic at hand and I’m still trying to formulate the whole ‘Why you should build your own engine and never use it’, blog post.

So consider that a preview of sorts.

Oh yeah and I knocked out another GUI mockup.