Anyways, Bitbucket repo for those who want to play around with things: (this one should have the files that were missing)
https://bitbucket.org/PiscesMike/castlevania-symphony-of-the-night

And for those who just want to play around with the executable:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5moEgyck5X5UElTMlRvNk1RQWM/view?usp=sharing
(Google Drive is a little funky with it's stuff… to download, you'll need to click the little button that looks like a down arrow on the top, middle of the screen. The install files come in an ZIP file.)

The beginning has a short video (~2 mins) thats a little background and intro to where this game starts off at. You can skip it by hitting 'Esc', but try to tap it kind of quickly as I just did a keyboard poll and if you hold it down, you'll miss the actual play part since once there, Esc ends the game. (I can take no credit for the video, although it wouldn't have been too difficult to code in, it seemed much easier to just rip a video since there's no user interaction at that point anyways)

A quick run down of controls:
Left-> Move left
Right-> Move right
A-> Attack
Space-> Jump
Esc-> Exit / End game

Anyways, hope you all are having a great day, and I'll see you in the chat room!

Anyways, finished out the collision detection stuff thats using the line segments. He now can walk back and forth, handle slopes going up and down and in the reverse direction… and will fall to his death if you plummet into a hole! After getting that done, I decided to add the little 'ghost' trail effect that you would see in the original game. I thought it was going to be a little difficult, but actually turned out not so bad, and pretty darned cool looking. It's not exactly the same as the real game, but it looks good enough for now. If time permits, perhaps I will update it to be more like the one in the released game.

Maybe next time I'll spare you all the debug info!

Time Machine: Worked for over an hour on code that you rip out later that day.

Occam's Razor: Simplify overly complex code into something smaller and more efficient (The simplest explanation is usually the best)

I'm a Lover, Not an Artist!: You get all, or most of your work, from online sources and do very little of your own artwork.

"Research": You spend a few hours playing a game when you should have been making one.

Leveled Up: You learned something that you didn't know that you can reuse in other games or other programs.

Prototype: You have something that could loosely be called a working game by the end of the first weekend.

½KLOC: Your game reaches 500 lines of code. You're off to a great start!

Less is S'more: Lines of code ain't everything. Sometimes, the best solution is to refactor to eliminate redundant lines of code, leaving you with less but better designed code. Do this and unlock this achievement.

Ran into some issues with the way I was implementing the background scrolling, but once again thanks to RB, I was able to rework some stuff and things are getting more structured. I was able to switch away from updating positions of items to be scrolled, to using the players location to generate a window to be rendered. I hadn't used this method before and had to play around with some settings, but things ended up going through another iteration of becoming more efficient and easier to understand. Now, I can add as many rooms as needed to the level and don't have to worry about little issues I was having with the player going off screen.

I was also able to implement scaling to the render images, and also eliminated the need to track source rectangles from the sprites (I'm now passing null for that parameter to represent the entire source image). After getting that done, I tweaked some viewport settings to make things resemble the actual console game a little more. So, the play area is magnified a little to fill up the screen.

So, got the first thing I was going to work on today done, but not much else, lol. Still a little while to go in my work day but probably won't make a ton of progress. Until next time, happy coding!

I'm going to try and get this typed out again before I accidentally delete the entire post. I seem to have a problem with that recently!

So the long story is that this morning I decided on some major behind the scenes refactoring. A lot of the stuff so far has really been prototyping and making sure my theory would work as planned. In ways it did, in other ways it needed a lot of improvement. I was about the chuck the whole thing in 'File 13' but RBWhitaker pulled me to the side and straightened me out. In the end I did get rid of about 75 code lines, completely replaced the rendering interface, completely replaced the 'entrance' gamestate, did some updates to my Actor and Actor behavior interfaces, and refactored some stuff into a 'sprite' class to better reflect their operations.

After pulling this off at various parts through the day, I got the animations imported and started building the first level once again. As you can see in the video, not much looks different. I did manage to get the candle animations put in, and added a 'cave' texture room right past the 'entrance' as in the official game. I also implemented some code to track the direction the player is facing… something that wasn't in previous versions. The biggest result of this is he now has a left 'idle' stance, where before he always defaulted to looking to the right when idling. Was also able to cut out about 16 animation frames since the older version was using an entire set of images for each direction he was facing. Now, I use hardware spriteeffects.fliphorizontal so I'm pretty happy overall!

For the time being, the player character still has some scrolling issues… as you'll see towards the end of the video, he will go right offscreen while the background is still 'catching up'. That will be one of the first things I address in the morning… although I won't be around until afternoon (EST). Other things I'm going to try and get done tomorrow: automap feature, some basic enemies, attack/jump/turn around animations, collision detection for the candles and collecting items that drop from them when attacked OR basic gravity physics and collision detection for the background/level graphics.

Kind of a full day, but if I could pull it off about the only thing I would have left to get worked out are the boss fights. All in all, it has been a decently productive week. Another good learning experience, and a good workout for the framework I hope to reuse. Ran into some problems but was able to get them worked out… which is about standard for me at this point in the competition. So, very optimistic going into week 2! Good luck with your games, and from what I've seen things are looking good for us all!

Updated video:

You can't see it in this video, but I've also got an update where he will stand idle, and only walk when you are pushing the walk button. Hopefully by tomorrow, I'll have these animations rolled into my behavior interface, and be able to put up a video of the player actually moving around like he would in the game!

I started a post the other day that was supposed to fill this no-update void, but thanks to an accidental hit of the 'back' button on my browser, the whole page got destroyed before it could make it live. Anywhos, just thought I'd throw up what I accomplished over the weekend, which is somewhere between not much (game wise) and a decent amount(object design wise).

Thanks to some constant nagging of RBWhitaker, I picked up a lot on the use of interfaces, as well as some general game design knowledge. That's lead me to rework my game framework somewhat. In the end, I think it will work a lot better with cleaner seperation of code/objects. Below, you'll find the flow chart of the new game framework I'm shooting for. Maybe it can be useful, or just interesting.

So, going by that design, I was able to get the basics working, and create the parallax scrolling backgrounds Castlevania is famous for. I made a video which you will see below. This was mostly for testing things out, and as such when I was creating it, I actually inverted the speed of the backgrounds. That is to say, the stuff in the background is moving faster than the stuff in the foreground. That's been reworked a little, and once I get a little more completed, I'll post another video.

Ok, as it turns out, I made another video with the speeds corrected:

At any rate, still just a little demo to make sure things are working out as planned. I've started work on the texture animation atlas, and should have an update where you can see the player running around shortly!