Dark Deception Developer’s Diary #3

It has been a good few months since the last Developer’s Diary for Dark Deception, and a lot, A LOT, has happened in the time since the last update.

For one, we now have a great new programmer. Bard Soedal of Mandal, Norway has been a Minecraft modder for several months now and has authored several Pokemon-themed character models such as a blocky Nidoking and an even blockier Pokemon Center. Awesome stuff. He’s now our new world-engineer and will be contributing his incredible talent to Team Corsehead until he returns to Norway next summer.

In terms of development, I have progressed to begin building the ESA Power Plant, the game’s first dungeon and the location of a critical story event driving the entire game’s action. It has been a long process of individually designing tiles pixel-by-pixel and laying them out. The content that you see below is pre-release content and will never reflect the look of the final version of the game.

 

All pretty cool stuff, the boards above collectively took about two months to construct.

I’ve been taking AP Computer Science since the start of the school year and in the few months I’ve been studying Java, have learned enough to put together a pretty basic computational prototype built out of a bunch of if statements, a lot of void methods and a few arrays and classes. The battle loop is fully functional as are special move-systems and damage and spoils calculation. However, a lot of functionality has yet to be implemented, including a modularity system so that the same code for the battle loop can work with any given enemy, character, equipment set or move-“deck”. Furthermore, the game’s most unique characteristic, a set of three offensive and defensive stances that any character in the battlefield can take for damage mitigation and bonuses, remains under construction.

Programming has been quite a joy to learn and has the lovely effect of putting one in a meditative state as one contemplates a variety of creative ways to solve problems. A great deal of imagination is needed to code effectively. Computer Science is a language that all should have the chance to undertake. Really cool stuff.

I tried exporting the demo from Eclipse as a .jar file, but the program crashed on launch. I’ll be working on finding a way to make the demo playable to anyone who wants to try it out in the coming weeks.

Peace
Kevin