Making Some Progress

First of all, I am officially postponing any iOS 7 exclusive updates for a while.  Instead I am going to go back to the old schedule and see the fire world through.  I made some major stat system changes and I am going to work on NPC's some more next time I get the chance.  The main feature of the next update will be the store.

I have gotten less time to work on the game then I hoped due to other things I have had to do this summer.  I hope to get more time during the school year now that I have finished a lot of those things.

NPC's Can Talk!

Recently I have been working on the NPC's that you will be able to chat with.  Today I wrote an NPC chat engine that allows complex conversations that can let the NPC ramble on for several text boxes worth of information or allow the user to select from up to four responses to reply to the NPC.  The system allows for a wide variation of conversation styles and will make the Town far more interesting in the future.  These NPC's will offer everything from advice to sidequests or they might just want to say hello.  This is also a major leap towards the store, which will be my next project.

An NPC that you can respond to.

An NPC with a full wall of text (this also serves as a demo for the font).

As you may notice, I am just using the Fire Mage image for this demo.  I will be talking with my artists about drawing different characters in an art style that can match the Mage.

Fixed Fireballs!

Today I finished the improvements to the fireballs that I have been working on!  Here's the list of changes:

-Improved hitbox:
    -Now you can throw fireballs past corners where you couldn't before!
    -Enemies may be a bit harder to hit in certain cases
    -Either way, the new hitbox matches the graphics more

-Multiple Fireballs:
    -You can now have more than one fireball on-screen!
    -Go ahead and rapid fire!

-Timed Dissipate
    -Before, if you throw a fireball off-screen, it will dissipate after it travels a certain distance in either x or y offscreen.
    -Now it is based on a timer.  The fireball will dissipate after 1.5 seconds (or if it hits something)



The last thing I want to do before the next update is do some iPhone 4 optimization.  Some of the recent updates have had a negative effect on the iPhone 4, and I would like to remedy that before I release.  Anyway, the next release will be fixes and improvements; no new content.  After that, I will be working on NPCs, which are also a precursor to having a store.

Fixed Falling On Blocks

Today I fixed up the physics for falling when you are standing on a falling block.  It works much smoother than it did before.

60 FPS!

The multithreading seems to be working, so I decided to up the FPS.  Before the update, the game ran at about 33 frames per second.  Now the FPS varies depending on device: the iPhone 4 runs at 30 FPS, the iPhone 4s and iPhone 5 run at 60 FPS.  I might lower the iPhone 4s FPS to 50, or add a dynamic FPS that changes depending on conditions.  Now that the multithreading is done with, I am mostly going to be working on NPC's in order to get the store working.  I also have an awesome new design for the menu screen, and plans for reworking the save system to allow 3 files and to keep your progress after you die (this functionality will be included with beds).

Multithreading!

I added multithreading support to the collision check functions.  Basically that means that lag should be significantly reduced (if the code is working as well as I hoped).  On the downside, there is a higher chance of weird bugs, although I think I got most of them.  I also added a few other things.

New Features:
-Multithreading
-New lava texture
-Improved item scroll view


I am working on adding NPC's and beds, redoing the save system and the menu system.  It will be a lot of work, but the next update will be a significant step towards finishing the engine completely (getting to a point where I can focus on adding levels rather than adding code).

Hello World

Hello everyone!  I recently had a friend recommend I start a developer's blog so here it is.  I'm going to post similar stuff to what I put on the Facebook page but more often and less formal.