Been a couple days since I sat down and did any coding. I felt kind of guilty neglecting the game, so I sat down and setup a basic title screen routine. The old engine never had one, so I just whipped up something really quick. Any key input automatically goes to the game screen:


    That's all for now, I may do a little more coding throughout the day but I'm unsure at the moment.

    This morning I had to do some grocery and furniture shopping before work, so I don't have time to work on it before I head in. Last night though, I cleaned up some code a little more and prevented a possible cheating glitch. The hit detection still needed some tweaking, because it was possible to glitch through walls horizontally when switching rooms vertically. This would've allowed people to blast through the map when the game is finished.

    I am going to try to find the time to also code some more on this actual blog. I am going to allow commenting, and setup some other sections for my other projects, such as my emulators. Goodbye for now.

    Just woke up a bit ago and wanted to do a little coding before I head off to work. Decided to get the background layer functioning, which was pretty painless. In the original engine, I never got around to making the background image stretch so that was first on the list. It is working perfectly.

    In the process, I realized that I could save some cycles in hit detection. Before, I was checking if we ran into any of the tiles all the time regardless if they were visible or not. Now it only detects the ones that are visible, resulting in a much speedier engine. This created problems with the in-game developer mode though. Since the tiles were invisible now, I couldn't do the point-'n-click level editing. I worked around this by hiding/showing tiles when developer mode is disabled and enabled now.

    Room traversing was next. In the original engine, I had a lot of problems getting it to work properly (at least when going left and right). However, it was fairly easy this time around. I managed to get it working perfectly aside from when jumping upwards to the next room above, which I fixed in a couple seconds.

    Aside from that, just commented the source code like crazy and cut out some useless stuff in some routines. Need to take another step back and review it tonight probably, it's sometimes difficult to see the redundant things while in the midst of coding. Anyway, time to get ready for work. Sorry, no new screenshots yet since there are no visible changes.

    Here's my new blog, started in order to show progress on the rewrite of my Gillian engine. What is the Gillian engine, you ask? It was a flip-screen game engine I created to make a Zillion fangame. I hadn't worked on it in a while, and my netbook was stolen earlier this year. I lost all the artwork that was ripped from Zillion and the newest version of the source code. I reprogrammed my other sidescroller engine recently, but decided to go back to the flip-screen style. Upon reviewing the source code, it was insanely inefficient. So, yesterday I started reprogramming the Gillian engine from scratch (sort of).

    The first thing I set as a goal was to make the engine's level editor work within the engine itself. To begin, I ripped out the code that lays out all the tiles from the original engine. Which eventually lead to ganking the reading/writing of the old map format, all of which were part of the original source code that wasn't so terrible. Oh, also the hit detection stuff was also taken, as there's no reason to reinvent that wheel either.

    I decided to opt for a simple solution with game/developer mode for now. All you have to do is hit the D button to switch developer mode off and on. When you turn it on a window pops up to the right of the game window called the "Room Editor", and the game itself is paused in the engine. Clicking one of the tiles enables you to draw the tile into the game with just a single click and, in the near future, change the background image.

    The most difficult part in the first 24 hours was getting the hit detection to not act all wacky. I had to unsloppy my code up because the player was getting thrown all over the place when they ran into certain things. At this point, you can move the non-animated character about the screen and do basic room editing. Probably over the next 24 hours or so, I will make tiles with different properties (such as pick-ups versus a block that you can't walk through) and get backgrounds working. Here's what it looks like with my temporary art placeholders:


    That's Olaf the Pig as my little placeholder character. I originally used him in an idea I had for a ZX Spectrum BASIC game and used the 8x8 pixel tile restriction from that computer platform as well. I have opted for a 16:9 display resolution so it will look nice on widescreens instead of a popular resolution from the 8-bit or 16-bit era. Anyway, that's all for now, check back here for updates. Oops! Almost forgot to say, I plan on making an entirely original game not another Zillion fangame. (;