Ok, there’s a new editor interface. Tiles are now collected into groups, each one associated with a letter. You can cycle through the tile attached to a letter, immediately place it, or attach that chosen tile to one of the number keys and then paint with your chosen palette on those keys. This gets rid of the keyboard character limitation and should make it easier to paint complex stuff as well. Internally I had to do some reworking to get rid of the last remnants of the old ASCII-based tile system, but I’m better off with that gone anyway.
There’s a new tile for a drawbridge (not implemented in-game yet) and I’m thinking of adding conveyor belts and pinball-style bumpers as well, since throwing the player around the field is such fun.
Just kind of randomly ducked in to add the deco tiles to Run Don’t Walk that I’ve been threatening for a while, as well as some more floor styles. This makes it possible to make a level that’s outwardly a little more plausible than just a random arrangement of bunkers in the middle of scrubland. There’s also a new tile for a bridge that can open and close, but it hasn’t been implemented in code yet.
Aaaaand I’ve just about used all the keys on the keyboard again. It’s just a little clumsy anyway to specify tiles this way, so I might try to think of a different interface for the editor. Hmm, perhaps you can pick tiles by pressing a letter once, or a few times to toggle between variations, then use spacebar to stamp it down? And shift plus the letter if you just want to drop a single one right away? I’ll have to think about this.
Two nice things in this screenshot:
First, there’s a little speech balloon thingy to allow the player avatar to communicate. I mostly put it in so a timer could be displayed while attempting to access the bonus computers which will be scattered around in risky locations, but it also seems handy for getting across stun, death, et cetera.
Second, the camera is smarter and won’t allow you to scroll off the edge of the map (unless the map is just too small to fill the screen.)
Also it’s now possible to get killed by falling into goo or water, although the code path isn’t fully fleshed out yet with a quick-restart.
Run Don’t Walk now has the ability to link levels to each other in the editor, and a lot of internal cleanup with level serialization, and editor fixes, and a number of bugs have been resolved, so it’s in pretty good shape to start making real maps. I do want to add some decorative tile modifications, though, and improve some interface stuff. Oh, plus it would be good if the goo actually killed the player. Should get on that one.
[video]
Rethought things a bit in Run Don’t Walk, and instead of having an XML level list I’m just encoding the targets of level exits directly in to levels themselves. I also added messages you can receive from the “bonus item” computers, and secret exits, and plugged all that stuff into editor commands. And, made a lot of internal fixups including getting rid of an absurd duplicated path for loading levels which was certainly going to cause me a lot of anguish in the long run. Now the only remaining part of level flow is actually getting those filenames and, you know, flowing to new levels.
Been tied up with other stuff the last week or so (again) but I had some time to code today. So this is not much to look at, but games need front end interfaces and Run Don’t Walk now has one — a matter of an hour’s work at most, since my engine already has all the UI classes I need right now. Having a start menu is also part of getting proper game flow in, including level flow. Overall, that’ll be pretty basic… it’s mostly a matter of having an XML file that lists levels, and picking one after another as the player reaches the exit in each. If I want to get super-fancy I’ll add a tile for a second, potentially secret, exit and the ability to branch to a different level in that case.
At long last goo is working again! Which is cool. Though not a big deal, it’s not like the rapidly spreading goo was the whole centerpiece of the game or anything like that.
I’ll cautiously say the next thing to work on should be level flow and various front-end stuff to play different levels.
Just a quick update here. Widminter reminded me in the comments that wall tiles could be selected automatically, something I’d meant to do but gave up on with the old, more complicated wall art style but which can be done easily with the new, simpler style. This is much easier to work with in the editor — two keys instead of twenty-six for laying down walls! I suppose the only downside is that you could do some artistic tricks selecting wall tiles individually, but frankly I can live without that.
One thing I’d like to do eventually is have some generic art variations, like computer displays and things on the walls. That’ll probably just be a modifier key in the editor which will cause the game to select a piece of deco if the underlying tile type supports it. Not going to implement that immediately, though.
In other news, I got the pressure plates working on a basic level, fixed some bugs with power transmission, and added a tile for the generic bonus item. So that’s cool. Hoping to get some more work done on this today.