How do birds suddenly appear?

There are things in the rooms now. NPCs to talk to, items to pick up, signs and whatever else to look at. What we are missing is something to attack! I’ve been pondering how to approach this for a while and I have seen a number of different approaches over the years. There’s the visible […]

Speaking an infinite deal of nothing.

Free text input is out at this stage. Even a brief cost/benefit study (read: panicked brainstorm) tells me that the hours that I would set aside to figuring this out, covering all the potential issues, attempting to allow for those issues and testing would not necessarily benefit the game or gameplay massively. So what lies between […]

Progress Update

Last time I blogged I was adding a few features (add items/drops to rooms, talk to NPCs etc) to expand on the interactivity of the rooms/cells. Items seemed easy. They’re there; you pick them up or you don’t, right?! Not really. I created a basic json file to store the bulk list of items, including a basic […]

No e-hoarding.

There are rooms to see and walk in and out of and people inside those rooms. Tonight I plan to do two things, and it’s an expectation that this may be two sittings not one. The two things are: Add items or drops to my rooms/cells. Talk to the NPCs. Look around the cell further. […]

Nothing will come of nothing.

Day one following the new construction plan and this afternoon has been quite successful. At the beginning of this sit down I had a bunch of empty rooms/cells with a very basic text identifier to print whenever I changed location. So I could move around without ever leaving the map but what was the point? […]

Next steps.

Life is a bit busy at the moment, so I’ve taken the last couple of days to check in and focus on setting some immediate targets or at the very least laying out what to focus on over the next fortnight. I have a simple but working map, a single user with no real features that can move around […]

Problem One (Of My Own Making) Solved

Today’s goal was to stop my user from walking off the ends of the planet(map)! I admit that I made a fairly severe error in planning and logic and trundled off down the path of creating a “Master Map” that would clearly rule them all. This master map was going to list all the rooms/cells […]

Progress Stage One

Todays progress step was to create a basic user interface and create a simple map to move around in. Progress Update! After downloading more packages (always more packages) there are five rooms, travelling North-South. Obviously nothing fancy. Collects user input and if North or South (or N/S) are entered it moves the user to the matching […]

The beginning of progress goals.

The story so far; I’ve settled on Java for language, Android for platform to distribute on (first?), and nested JSON files to store the mapping and object data so it can be parsed into an array of map objects in Java. My internet has crawled along for long enough that the JDK and Android Studio are […]

Java!

As I’m sure you can guess – I’ve been thinking and planning pretty much nonstop over the last few days and as a result I’ve made a few in-roads into where my starting point might be and what my short term goals will be. So far I know it will be text-based and a role-playing game. […]