Greetings, all!
I've done a good amount more programming on Adrift since I last posted, getting a background drawing, fine-tuning the movement, setting up a system where the player won't go off the screen, changing how particles are affected, and even camera-centering once the player slows down, but then I stopped working on it. See, there's three kinds of moods/phases I can be in when programming: the first is highly excited, constantly working on my project, at least when I have the time, and always knowing what to work on next. The second is after the initial excitement phase has passed, and I'm still working on and enjoying programming my project, but the goal is mostly to finish it. The third, then, is when I'm just not feeling it, I don't really know what to do, and I'm not getting much done. Chances are that the rest of you know exactly what I'm talking about with all three of these.
Unfortunately, this project fell into the third category, and, considering that we're in the middle of a competition and, when I was thinking this through on Monday, at the beginning of a week I have entirely free, I wasn't going to spend it just feeling 'meh' about the whole thing.
So, I ditched it.
Instead, I present you with:
Constant Through the Ages! Which is, of course, fighting (unfortunate truth that it is).
This game is going to be relatively simple, since I only had about half of the competition left when I began, but it's both more fun to program and gives me the opportunity to play with a new toy I discovered the other day, which I've been wanting to do for a while, learned courtesy of RB's extremely useful C# Player's Guide, which I haven't read all the way through for some reason. I dunno why, because I'd learn a lot. (In case you're curious, what I learned was how to write and read files, which opens up a lot of possibilities for saved games, saved preferences, and the like, which I'm excited about!) Sorry for the sidetrack, getting back on topic now.
So, Constant Through the Ages is going to be/already mostly is a top-down 2D hack-and-slash game, at least for the most part. There's going to be three kinds of characters, which are fighters/soldiers from different time periods: the barbarians, as you see above, modern-day soldiers, and, of course, future soldiers. In the end game you'll be able to choose which one to play as, and what percentage of the enemies you'll be fighting are made up of any type of character. (For example, you'll be able to choose to play as a future soldier, with 50% ancient warriors, 40% modern-day soldiers, and 10% future soldiers as enemies.)
The ancient soldiers are actually fully implemented already, due to a lot of programming and drawing and not much else of anything else on my part over the last couple days, lol. The only thing I haven't done yet for them is completely finish how their shields work, unless I'm forgetting something, which I won't be able to do until I add in the modern soldiers, which is next on the list. (Getting the shields to block was actually really difficult, so if people are interested I can explain how I did that.) Here's the completed character atlas for the ancient warriors, just for fun:
I think this is my first time doing hand-drawn animations in a game, and, as surprisingly decent-looking as it turned out, I'm not anxious to do it again, haha!
Finally, to wrap up a long post … I'm going to give you a download.
https://bitbucket.org/TheMazinTar/constant-through-the-ages/downloads
Controls are pretty simple: WASD to move, use the mouse to point, left mouse button attacks, holding the right mouse button blocks, although only in the direction you're facing, and, as you take damage, a visual aid will begin to appear on the screen, colored a beautiful bright red. =] Also, when you start the program, no enemies will spawn until you press P, so be sure to do that.
Let me know what you think!
