Spellcaster Studios

Make it happen…

Monthly Archives: July 2015

Loading savegames…

Still working on this (and hitting myself in the head for not doing a more common system for this in the beginning, more “abstract”). Anyway, reached an issue that will make the code altogether more complicated… On the XML loader, the player data (positions, weapons, etc) is stored in an XML node, so when loading […]

Work, work, work…

Note to self: always do ASCII/binary save game code in parallel, or using some sort of abstraction… :\ Actually, I usually do this, a bit more data-driven approach than with this game, but since this game is a the Frankenstein of games, I’m paying the cost (technological debt) yet again… This game would have been […]

Savegames done…

New version of the savegames, now in binary, is complete… Used to take 2 to 9 seconds to make a save in XML, now it takes 50 ms… So, that’s a win! Next step, load the savegame, which should be the easy part… Would have been done by now, if I wasn’t still sorting some […]

Savegames, revisited…

The savegames on Gateway are taking a bit too long to execute (about 2 secs)… This is not a big issue, but it causes some stalls before and after a cutscene, and I dislike it… Besides, the first save I save, it takes 2 seconds, but the second (and the rest) takes 9 seconds, which […]

New assets…

What should be just 15 minutes of my time ended up being a couple of hours today… The artist provided me some new props for the labs, and I was putting them into the game, but I couldn’t get them to display! After a lot of time of fruitless debugging, the issue ended up being […]

Selection

I have more time for Byron Bay, since today is actually my wedding anniversary… So I just added the selection capability to the action mapper and UI map… Unfortunately, just remembered I still have a very complex component to make for the UI Map system: the scrolling components… That one will be tricky to add […]

Mapping actions…

Most of the major code of the action mapper is done, now I need to convert the existing code to use the action mapper instead of the previous systems… On some cases this might prove tricky (the email viewer, for example), since it was one of the first things I’ve created, so it’s a bit […]

The action mapper

Two things I was still missing from the core tech was the ability to redefine keys (not everyone likes my layout, of course, and people with keyboards different from QWERTY might have some difficulty using WASD), and controller support. For both of these, I need to build an action mapper. This is an abstraction layer […]

Particle bugs…

Not much time for game development today… Since my professional life is a bit undecided at the moment, I’m taking some time to work on a portfolio and my CV, and see what’s out there… Anyway, I did some work on a weird bug that I noticed on the Mac build (although it’s present on […]

A lot of bug-fixing…

Today was the time for a lot of bug-fixing (you remember the list from yesterday?!): – Bounding boxes now correct (they were screwing up on some tall objects, which led them to disappear before they should, instead of only off-screen). – Sound issues were solved (including the combat music rolling in and out properly… Also […]