Oh real life, why must you impose on my precious coding time? Oh right: the mortgage.
Progress has slowed to a more normal pace with the end of the holidays and return to reality - but things are still moving. There's a short thread about 7YRL up on TouchArcade - it's amazing how even a few short sentences from folks you don't know can keep you seriously energized :).
Here's what's new:
Skills in the Skill Selector UI
As players advance in the game, they'll unlock skills across four categories; three active: offense, defense, support, and one passive. They'll be able to choose one of each of those categories at any point in time, and on the gameplay screen they'll have buttons to activate the 3 active skills. In previous screenshots those were just placeholder art; now though it's showing the actual skills and is interactive.
Here are the hunter and mage skills (the skills themselves are temporary placeholders - this just shows infrastructure functioning:
I'm really looking forward to playing around a ton with creating skills. I've defined 10 skills for each of the 4 categories for each of the 4 classes (so 160 skills) and the majority of them fit within the existing event/action system so should be fairly straightforward to add. For example, here are the Warrior skills:
Some of those will change (e.g. I'm probably going to remove the concept of 'speed'), and I still need to convert those into XML-based Event/Action triggers. And, of course, then comes the balancing act. But that's all fun stuff to do...
Death
The game prototype is currently harder than intended, so death comes quickly. The previous demo just dropped the player back to the choosegameslot state which was bad for two reasons; (1) it seems like a crash when it happens and (2) it should instead go to the mainmenu state for the player to create a new character. That's all fixed now with an interim screen that tells the player what happened:
That screen sits there for a few seconds before jumping to the mainmenu state; eventually this screen will do more, including showing stats/progress, and possibly global rankings and whatnot.
Up next:
The above were fairly quick to do - the real effort over the past few days has been getting an installable Mac demo up and running. Between purchasing the Xamarin.Mac license (wuff), the Apple dev license (wuff), dealing with a ton of linker and cert/profile issues, and trying to coerce the Xamarin.mac installer to obey me, it's been a bit of a slog. But I'm very close now and am the last stage of verification (but alas even that is more painful than it should be). Still: I'm hoping to have the Mac demo up on indiedb (et al) by the end of the weekend. Then I'll take a look at TestFlight and start figuring out what's involved in making an iOS demo available more publicly.
