We had a little scare this last week. Our one month old daughter had to spend a few days in the hospital due to a virus and an infection. Normally it wouldn't have been a big deal but since she was so young they kept her for a few days for observation. Needless to say it's been a stressful and scary few days. I hope none of you fathers ever have to watch your child go through a spinal tap, it was heart breaking. Everything is all good now and both mommy and baby are safe at home resting. So on to some better news!

    A friend of mine has jumped in to help with writing and brainstorming. In a few short days the combat system design is already much more fleshed out layered than before. We are headed in a good direction. 

    That being said, I haven't had much coding time lately. I've made some styling and formatting changes to the combat screen to buy some more real estate. I have cards appearing on screen that are actual generated objects from player stats and random rolls. When you select a card in your hand you get a detailed view and a set of button to continue or choose a different card. The next few days and likely the weekend will spent cleaning this up and likely getting damage calculations in. 

    We are still a few weeks out from having combat functioning in rounds with basic AI and win/defeat implemented. As we get closer I'll post a few more pics. 

-Terrordoll

Quick update:

    The text system is finished, or enough so that I'm content moving on. There is still some work to do updating button text and tool tips but the main story/conversation text now has a reliable system to display it. Combat is now the most in need of some love so that will be my new focus. I may have a few polls on system possibilities soon.

-Terrordoll

Time for quick update!

    Things have been progressing a bit more slowly than expected. That being said, I have accomplished a decent amount. I wrote my first 900 words and according to people who know (thanks Kaizer_Z), it doesn't suck. It may actually be good, we'll see. So I consider that the first major hurdle crossed. I haven't written anything in quite some time and was legitimately worried this whole endeavor wasn't going to work out beyond being a coding project. So bullet = dodged.

    Now that I have some text I've been working on a decent system to get it in game. I drastically underestimated how difficult this would be. I'm finishing up a prototype of the system now. I don't love it, but it's the method I hate the least. I should have it done in a day or so depending. Once that is done it's back to fixing up the UI. After that it's on to combat in earnest. I'll keep you all updated on my progress. Expect some more screens within a week.

    After a brief hiatus for the birth of my daughter, I'm back to programming! It was a much needed break and it has done wonders for my motivation. In addition to getting fully back into the swing of things, I've also decided to make some pretty major changes to the structure. Of course none of this will matter to you because I neglected to actually tell you about the game. I promise to get something up about it soon. I've been coding as much as I can, trying to take advantage of the momentum. Strike while the iron is hot and all that....

    The biggest change is an entire rewrite of the engine. I have started rebuilding it again using MVVM (it's in C# and WPF, MVVM is just a methodology) and it's worlds better than it was before. Everything is clean and decoupled. Adding new systems and features is a smoother process, saving me both time and hair, two increasingly limited resources. 

    I've also totally reworked the combat mechanics. It now uses two sets of bars, Pools and Defenses. Depleting a Pool bar defeats a foe and gives a small Essence (I'll go into this later) reward. This is the easiest to win an encounter. The other way to win is to attack a Defense bar which then opens up the Willpower bar. Reducing the Willpower bar represents your total defeat of a enemy and results in the highest amount of harvested Essence. I'm really happy with this change, it's going to give me much more flexibility designing progression, equipment and encounters. 

    Right now I have the base of the engine built and screen navigation functioning. Combat is pretty far along but the card system needs a decent amount of work. The location screens, the main game interface needs the most work. The buttons all function but the system to display the text and check variables hasn't been implemented. I plan on making decent headway into those systems over the next few weeks.

   As a teaser, here are two screenshots of my progress so far. The first image is the title screen and the second is combat. They are both very early in development so be gentle with me. I'm no artist and my eye for UI and colors isn't great. Feel free to comment and ask questions, I'll try to answer what I can

The second image is definitely not work safe. 

Title

http://imgur.com/7d3tC21

Combat

http://imgur.com/2GAISSk

Terrordoll