Posts by James:
Engine Update: Scenery, Terrain, and Hero
March 2nd, 2013
Here are the latest new features:
Scenery: Each new level can now have scenery marked up in the level file. Scenery can be animated or static in visual appearance. Soon, I’ll get around to building lots of little knickknacks to position all over the map to stress test i. Terrain acts like terrain should, but the art for the grass is temporary. Expect something prettier when I have some trees, rocks, fences, bushes etc.
Hero: The hero is now loaded into the game on start up. He isn’t animated yet, that will take more time and planning, but he has some rudimentary logic in place that allows him to walk around and double jump. Thanks to the Nape Physics engine, he glides over slanted hills with ease, coming to a full stop when there is no directional input from the player. Input comes from…
Keyboard commands: A dynamic keyboard mapping tool was built to allow you to swap out key values for controls. Currently the player uses the arrow keys and ‘a’ key to get around.
GamePad support: The hero can also be controlled by an Xbox360 gamepad using the left thumbstick and ‘a’ button.
Camera: A simple camera keeps the hero locked near the center of the screen. Soon, I’ll be able to limit it by a level bounding box, and have it set its attention to Entity objects other than the hero.
Console: You can now bring up a console to feed in commands to the game. Currently, you’re only able to enable and disable gamepad control, as well as load a sound or song of your choice for playback.
The UI is just for show right now. I’m building the InGameUI class to handle supporting the health bar, mana bar, inventory, and spell icons.
Thanks to Adobe AIR, I can already install this on Windows and Mac machines using the Adobe AIR installer. So far, everything works, including gamepad support, outside of the FlashBuilder dev environment. Excellent!
Feeling great about this right now. A lot of new features are getting popped out faster than ever now that the ‘hard part’ of getting the physics and graphics up and running is over.
Coming up:
Simple In Game Level Editor
More UI (Dialog screens, fonts, menus, etc)…