Furglot

I thought I'd start introducing some monsters.  Furglots look a bit like tufts of grass or green fur (hence Trace's name for them, "Furglot").  They jump around like fleas and drain your energy if they latch onto you.

Final Weapon Update

I finished the last of the weapons tonight - or at least, the last of the weapons I'm okay with "spoiling" on my blog.  I counted them all, and evidently I made 2 more than I'd planned for (and I have no idea how that happened!).

Fat Beam

While this is not the final naming, I feel "Fat Beam" describes fairly adequately this huge beam attack that's larger than the weapon's muzzle - and which gets larger as you level your weapon power.

It's surprising how much trouble this weapon gave me, considering how simple it is.  While I would have estimated the lightning gun would give me trouble, I programmed that weapon in a single day; the Fat Beam, on the other hand, took me a full week.

Lightning Gun

I made 3 new weapons in the past 3 days.  Here's one of them.

Map Screen

I'd debated going super old-school and not providing an automap of any kind, but eventually caved in and added a somewhat minimal map interface.  It'll never fill out an area before you've explored it, or point you to your next objective, or anything like that (I always had the feeling that I was cheating when a game forced that on me).  The AV map screen doesn't even represent "walls" save as a black dividing area that occurs only after you've explored both sides of a boundary.  Hopefully this will allow it to serve as a record of where you've been without unnecessarily spoiling to much about what's to come.

The reason it's smaller than the typical automap is that eventually I want to incorporate this into an inventory screen similar to the one in Zelda, allowing you to equip one weapon and one item at a time.

Thoughts?

Walking The Dog

It appears I'm safe from kidney stones - at least for the time being.  I finally made a weapons testing room with a variety of different tiles in it to verify that everything works, which is why this image is kind of a jumble!  Here's another weapon pickup to show for it.  

Back From Southeast Asia

I spent the past two weeks in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand with C.  It was awesome!

Quite a bit less awesome was getting a kidney stone the day after I returned:

I'm feeling much better now but it does hurt if I sit or stand for too long, so coding AV is on hiatus (as is just about everything else in my life) until I'm sure the stone is out of my system.

Further Tests

This time with the labcoat open in front.

Progress

I've been doing a lot of this lately - coding weapons and then shooting them in every possible circumstance to make sure they behave correctly.  The shape of the save station with its various slopes and corners makes it a good testbed.

Experimenting with Trace's Sprite

Trace's sprite needs an overhaul.  I'm internally debating on whether to give him a labcoat, since he is, at least in my current iteration of the story, a scientist.  However it does give him a resemblance to Soma Cruz's ensemble.  

The middle picture is an inbetween step where I improve the clarity of his features but still keep him casually dressed.