Since this Game Maker version of Legend of Iya was initially conceived as nothing more but a guideline to since discontinued DS version, its fundamental code basis was never particularly thought out. As a result, the features kept being added to an engine that had some serious flaws at its core. This week I finally went into the game's dark smelly basement to fix several annoying, and to be honest - noobish bugs that have been plaguing the game all along. Most of the fixes centered around the controls, which on certain machines (such as, once again - my netbook) had severe issues with key polling. Other fixed issues dealt with some basic animation handling and collision. Even though I'm pretty happy with the improvements, I'm sure this isn't the last time I have to screw around with LOI's shaky foundation.
Other progress:
* Added tile tint control to the background scrollers - now I can add even more color variation to the areas with the same tileset... I am physically restraining myself from adding some sort of a weather/day-night system to the game now.
* Finally added functional game saving and loading. Still need to make the feature more robust, but the basic file handling is there. At the moment the game saves its data in plain text with a file footprint of only 3k.
* Designed another enemy. Must animate him still.
* Close to be done with the second boss fight. Needs more animations and visual effects. Also - cleaner scripting.
* Worked more on the start area screen (which is a giant pixel painting)
* Started several new Iya animations - such as one for climbing onto knee-high steps, and one for hopping over small obstacles. The animation for looking up had to be temporarily disabled, as it messed up some of the attacks.
* Did more room texturing.
* Started another set-piece room near the beginning of the game.
...Gahh - too many holes to plug for one person: )
(the skin file can be downloaded here)
Not much in terms of asset updates, however, over the last two days I have solved a large-ish issue with the game. You see - Game Maker is a slow, high-level script. Its math computations are laggy, and its asset management is rather inefficient. But hey! I'm not really complaining there. My biggest issue with it, however, its abysmal handling of tiles. Not only that the built-in tile editor is completely worthless, and doesn't allow to utilize even a fraction of GM's own tile manipulation abilities, but the output algorithm is incredibly inefficient. It appears it blits every tile in the room on each redraw - with larger tiles most people use - it's not really a problem, but since I had to use DS-compatible tilesets of 8x8 elements the game ran like crap on lower-end computers.
There certainly is some similarity, but it ends with "hero girl with a ponytail".
Free time has been ridiculously sparse lately, and I didn't even have my daily commutes to fall back on last week. I am getting closer and closer to finishing the *first* boss fight, but somehow the closer I get - more and more tiny new details become vital to address. As of right now - the whole battle is playeble from start to finish, although I'm not sure just how well, since I didn't have anyone other than myself play it yet. Things I still need to add are a more spectacular boss death effect, better boss announcement, ability to punch the boss into non-vital parts with "ineffective" message popping up, tweak the bosses punch range - it's a bit too short, a powerup drop after the boss is defeated, a finished power-up-get animation and effect, and more and better sound effects - but that's pretty true of the game on the whole. I need to start working on the event flag and save systems, so the boss battle and puzzles don't reset every time I leave a room, as it's becoming annoying.
This is a "dead man's switch" update, mainly to show that I'm still actively working on the project. My main area of focus at this particular point is the first boss battle. Since I'm going with heavily scripted and animated boss fights - it is taking me a while, but the fight in itself is done. All I'm left to do there is complete art and scripting for the intro and the outtro sequences. The first arena art is pretty much done as well, but I am struggling to prevent myself from trying to make it even prettier.
