Hopefully I’ll be getting my hands on the new artwork for our first world, and will be able to pump out some levels and some correlating artwork!

On a more unfortunate note, the small surprise I posted a couple weeks back is in quite a rut, my Photoshop skills need a bit of brushing up before I can show what I’ve in mind.  So the release on that is… unsure.

So, while designing levels in the level editor I was getting sick of scrolling through all the different tiles looking for the ones I wanted. So, I took matters into my own hands and created a class called Palette which extends Java’s JFrame. These little windows can be brought up allowing you to drag a collection of tiles/objects from the editor into them and use them from there.

The palettes can also be saved and there can be multiple on screen at any given time. It can be very useful to make different palettes for enemies, for different areas, or for anything and load them later.

Now, if I can find the time, I’m going to make a bunch of really useful palettes and save them all for when I want to do some serious level editing.

-James

I reworked the old lighting system and took out the translucent images we were using as light sources. Now, the game calculates the area of the map, subtracts from it where the light sources are, and draws just the outline of the shapes translucently with increasing stroke size. The result is that when the light sources meet there’s a nice mixing of the areas.

Here’s a nice article on strokes in Java that I used as a reference:

Java 2D Trickery: Light and Shadow

-James

Some quick Updates:

Here’s a quick preview of some new enemies I added to the Moldering world. I’ve used the stock graphics and drew some basic sprites just to get things up and running.

On other news I’ve had some success and some problems with Ogg. I’ve gotten tracks to successfully loop and stop when finished without crashing the system or looping the last second or so. However, there’s a small lag when the track is first loaded and when it starts over.

I wonder, does this have to do with Ogg streaming, is it OpenAL, or something entirely different?

Hey, we’re back from vacation, and while I was away I programmed some cool things.

1. Slow-motion. This is a temporary slow motion in which everything is slowed.

2. Slow-motion 2. This slow motion allows the player to move at regular speed while everything else is slowed down.

3. Save points. These points can save and load the player’s position.

4. Death. The player can die now and the user will need to load the game when this happens.

5. Spikes. The first objects I created as a test to kill the player.

6. Screen shaking effect. This can be used to simulate large things pounding the ground or earthquakes.

Can’t wait to work on some more cool new things.

-James