It's My Birthday! (And some Dubloon updates)

Today's my birthday! Hooray! Despite that, I'm not really doing anything special tonight and instead right now am still working on Dubloon. I can get really obsessive/dedicated to my work; one particularly fond memory was our family Christmas dinner this past winter, where I brought my laptop to and ended up spending the whole night finishing up the programming for Assassin Blue's final boss. "Vacation?" I know not the meaning of the word.

...ANYway, I've been working on Dubloon following comments from the first engine release. Got some cool stuff going right now. The HUD has more effects and some more usability (you can now drag and drop equipped items from one party member to the other, those types of things) and the SPEC menu is now up and running-- items in the SPEC menu are dragged and dropped onto the main screen to interact with the overworld. Right now the only items I have programmed in there are keys (to use on locks, naturally), but I plan to extend it with items like bombs, or ladders, or what have you...

I also made a basic NPC system, and a merchant system. When you're in range, a small prompt appears above characters' heads telling you to click them; clicking on an NPC initiates dialog. Merchants stand in front of a row of items, and you just drag and drop the items from the ground into your inventory to purchase them. To sell an item, just drag it over the merchant. Simple and virtually menuless. I'm rather fond of how the entirely mouse-controlled interface works.

But all that stuff is boring to screenshot, so instead I'll show you some of the nifty attack effects I've been making...




Of course they look much better in full animation, but you hopefully get the gist. I might put out another release once I'm totally satisfied with the engine at this stage, and then I'll get to work actually designing cutscenes and levels and the like. There'll be a big gap before I put out parts of the game with actual plot included.

As usual, working on the game and thinking of ideas for it is seriously exciting for me and I tend to just drift off on intense brainstorms. And then I suddenly remember again-- it's my birthday!