Deep Madness Dev Logs — Week 3: Basically the Beginning
You might be wondering why this is the first dev log even though it’s week 3 of development. Well, we here at Stealth Elephants have never made a game like this before, so we didn’t think to write a dev log until this past week. In any case, let’s just get right into it.
Deep Madness is being made without any libraries or engines, so these first few weeks were spent doing exciting things like making a window and getting input from the user. As far as basic functionality goes, we’ve got graphics and keyboard input, but no sound at the moment. The graphics are two-dimensional, so most things are represented with squares at the moment.
As for actual gameplay, the character currently moves just fine. Collision works, but the character’s hitbox is only one pixel in the bottom-center. So that needs to be expanded to feel better when you’re moving around. That said, the current version is a placeholder, and it’s good enough that I’m probably not going to make it a priority to work on.
Movement between screens works on the surface level. If you were just a player going through this for yourself, you’d not see any major issues I think, but I don’t think it’s in a permanent spot right now. You see, for the moment, tilemaps are saved as individual files on the user’s computer, and each time you change screens, you load a new file. Each file is only one kilobyte right now, which means the load time is totally unnoticeable, but I get the feeling that it’s not a system that will hold up once I use it for more complex tasks.
The player can also move up and down staircases to seperate levels, but at the moment a staircase tile can only be one way. Once I get them set up to work only when the player first enters them, I’ll be able to make two-way staircases. Right now staircases going up are a lightish gray and the ones going down are a slightly darker gray. Those graphics are probably a little vague right now and should be updated, but it’s not a priority.
The final feature I wanna talk about today is the edit mode. This is the feature that I’m most proud of at the moment. While the actual game may be lacking in complexity, the editor lets you change the content of the game from right inside the game without having to switch programs. At any moment, the user can push a button to trigger an edit mode, at which point they can just click the tiles around the level to change them from walls to stairs and back again. They can then save that changed level permanently, or reload the saved version if they don’t like their changes.
Another minor feature of edit mode is the option to toggle player collision on and off. It’s useful, but not really that impressive. If you look closely at the gif, you might notice that the squares being clicked are slightly off from the location of the cursor. This is a bug, and will be fixed at some point.
Another thing to notice in edit mode is the nice icon that appears at the top when it’s turned on. This is actually the very first piece of art created for the game (technically) by our very own Sienna Milligan.
Of course, I’m not going to say it’s “technically” the first piece of art without explaining. While this is the first piece of artwork that we’re actually properly putting in the game, there was another piece that was made as sort of concept art, again by Sienna Milligan. Here it is:
That’s all we’ve got to show off this week. Barring any major problems, there should be another log like this next week and the week afterwards. Thanks for reading, we hope you enjoyed!
