Can't believe it has been over...
eight years since the last update.
Seems the quarantine has yanked yet another project out of the void.
Well, not exactly, I've been working on this still in some capacity off and on since my last post. It's rather comical looking back at the last updates. That's some legendary scope creep if ever I've seen it.
In the last week I've been posting updates on my a devlog page dedicated to this development, which you can read
here. If you read them, note that even since I started writing these posts, some things have changed. I actually lost my job because of this virus so I've been working on this pretty much all day everyday, and progress is movin' quick.
But I'm not here to promote my own blog, so I'll non-comprehensively summarize some of the developments since, uh, March of '12.
- First of all, the engine was scrapped and written from scratch again. As far as RAM goes, I'm not worrying about it for now. I expect a 32K expansion will be required, and that's what I'm using to test.
- Bitmaps are 96x112 (this seems to be a good compromise between providing ample room for content and me actually being able to make that content timely). If you look at my post in '10 (looks like at least that image isn't broken yet, heh), you can see my first bitmap approach was an ambitious 160 pixels wide.
- Objects each have their own handlers and their are no built in behaviors for various fields as I defined in the last post. If an item, God forbid, needs to concern itself with a weight property, it is up to that object's own callback. Objects are actually just a combination of a sprite, some very basic data (a name and description), and two
- Following the guidance of recent point-and-clicks, there aren't two dozen different selectable actions the user can perform on something. You can use/operate, look at, or take it.
- I'm leaning heavily on Python to generate the game data. The native Vic-20 suite I was using before was charming but it definitely was becoming cumbersome to manage all the game data. A script now converts the room data and object images/data into a binary files to be written onto the disk image.
