programming

Hero iteration 4 progressI spent most of the day working on the level editor for Hero, now you can position Enemies in the dungeons. Now I need to be able to place crates, they are totally random now... And maybe decorate the dungeons with some destructible furniture... I kind of like the idea that you hack yourself through obstacles...

Iteration 4, dungeon with outdoors starting location

So iteration 3 was released on hUb and I got a lot of feedback, mostly from my twitter friends and from the spell of play team. It is great that so many of you shows interest for this project, it makes me want to give you more!

One of the super great things about iterative development is that you get so early feedback. For example I got a twitter comment about a bug and two hours later a new version of hero was up on hUb without it.

I´ve started development of iteration 4, wrote some plans and done a little fixing of some small issues mentioned in feedback.

Iteration 4

Iteration 4 half walls, blocks movement but not visibilityOne thing I wanted was blocking tiles, that block movement but does not block arrows completely, so you can take cover behind them and fire arrows (and in future magic) at your enemies... And to use as tables or altars and put items and fire and whatnot on them... They are not destructible, since the light maps needs to be recalculated.

Well development is kind of slow since I get only 1-2 hours a day of time in front of the PC (for those who don't know I´m on parental leave with two small kids). So I try to prioritize like hell and some very cool ideas will have to wait until I get the time to finish them in one longer programming session.

I try to improve the stuff I got and slowly add new features, taking my time refactoring and rewriting my code often. If you get to many stinks in the code you don't want to work in it anymore...

One problem is that this project does not have a dedicated artist, and as some of you know I get the nice isometric art from Reiner Prokein´s free art. My plan is to try to manage with what I get from there and when the project is a bit more stable I hope to get one or more artist along for the ride... (Actually Gridur has done some art for I3 (the weapons and potions) and I hope he will show us some more of his great 2D skills in future iterations too!

Now I´m going to put the kids in their beds!

Daniel @dntoll Toll