Monday 21 November 2011

Secret idea

I got my ass kicked by the first temple's boss in Zelda Skyward Sword. And I had one revitalizing potion (restores four hearts). So they finally decided to make Zelda harder. Well, one of the strange things is that I don't know how to use the shield. Would it help in that battle anyway? Maybe I'm going to cry for two days and then look for Youtube videos about how to beat that son of a bitch.

While playing Zelda I got an idea. It must remain a secret however, because it's going to change one of the main areas of a roguelike. And what is a better project to use that idea than next gen roguelike.

Sunday 13 November 2011

Bug hunting

Today I fixed a special bug that made the program crash in Long Corridor level theme. It was a special one because there are no other known bugs that crash the program. The bug was relatively easy to find. In fact I was using VC debugger to find it. Usually I don't even need a debugger to find the bug, but in this case it was needed.

The number of open bugs is 12 which isn't that bad. I try to limit it under 10 to keep the game playable and as solid as possible. Some bugs are caused by parts of the code that are going to be refactored and usually the bug will be fixed at the same time. The current speed of development is quite fast and I believe it will produce an increasing number of bugs, but it's obvious that the release version will have zero known bugs.

Friday 11 November 2011

Theme randomness

I'm having trouble trying to determine the stuff that will be generated in level themes. With lots of stuff it becomes more difficult to figure out how to select that stuff. There is a list of stuff to create for each level theme, but I know it's too restricted and predictable. Creating a list is easy, because you don't have to program a logic that "thinks" what could belong to that particular level theme. And that is exactly what I have to do next.

It's not an easy task. There must be a new type of classification of objects just for level creation. Then the level theme could ask an object from different kind of classes to generate in specific terrain area or climate condition or whatever the reason will be.

Wednesday 2 November 2011

Level class

Returned to Level class. I have switched between big classes and browsed through them, fixing everything in sight. Level class is possibly the worst of them, because the dungeon generator still has some problems. It can't generate all level themes yet, but I'm working on it.

In some parts I have made a decision to settle for less great stuff to speed up development. Maybe I'm really looking forward to create a playable version, no matter what features it could be missing. Still, I'm pretty sure that the first playable version is not going to be a release version.