09.Sep.2024
Fabio Falcucci (Mail)
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Developer log: First map of the game "The Gate" completed
At the beginning of October last year , we introduced the AMOS game "The Gate" by Fabio 'Allanon' Falcucci, a mixture of "Impossible Mission" and "Project Firestart" with his own ideas and concepts. The developer reports on his progress on Patreon, but has kindly summarised the current status for us:
"I spent the last 2 weeks working on the first map (Mastodon screenshot) and I have also fixed several bugs I saw only during the map testing phase. I also added some missing functionalities to the engine to make easier for me to create and handle the game contents, here is a list of the most important things:
- I've completed the 5 door types available in the game, If I need to I can add more types, nothing is hard coded anymore.
- I've optimized the game especially using graphics blocks to clear areas instead of using the slow drawing commands (BAR for example).
- I've started to work on a game editor: the initial idea was that this would helped me to create the game contents faster, but I soon realized that this would take up a lot of my time and I was anxious to see if the engine worked well, so for now I will continue to create the content manually.
- Terminals and dialogues are using a scripting language created from scratch by me, it supports strings and numeric variables, but they were local to the currently executed script. I needed some persistent space to store stuff so I implemented Map Variables (which are reset every time the map is loaded, but I can share values between map-scripts) and Global Variables (which are reset at the game beginning and can share data between script on different maps).
- In the Terminal scripting language I also added a JUMPSUB/RETURN pair of commands to recycle repetitive code sections and make the scripts smaller.
- I've adjusted all the graphics I have to make it proportional with the character's size, I've enlarged all of them manually to make pixel perfect (at my best).
- I fixed a nasty bug in my script parser: empty lines was causing dead loops blocking the program flow.
- Dialogue definitions now supports actors declaration, this means that dialogs executed by triggers can be between several actors (and not just 2!).
- Some bugs related to the secondary weapons/devices are fixed, as well as the damage computation of the hit enemies.
I'm very happy because when I finished the first map and started testing it, everything worked as intended: Dialogues followed the programmed branching, triggers worked, animations worked and most importantly, the terminal simulator worked too!
I am happy about everyone who supports my work on Patreon." (dr)
[News message: 09. Sep. 2024, 08:24] [Comments: 0]
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