July 7th, 2011
Normal melee (katana), special melee (pitchfork), normal ranged (bottle), special ranged (whip) are all implemented and working properly. Instead off adding another item to the animation_list, I just added a few lines of code in the dude portion of the animation module to display an additional surface, centered over the dude’s position. This way, the katana bobs up and down and lines up with the dude’s hand as he runs around. The katana is currently the only one I’ve animated like this; it feels kind of pointless to be spending this much time in photoshop when I know that these graphics are nothing but placeholders anyways. I suppose after I have all the guts of the program finished I’ll go back and animate the rest of the weapons and enemies. The whip looks pretty retarded, but it’s the only way I can think to animate something like that. Maybe I can go back and change the graphic used so it doesn’t look as stupid when it’s rotated. We’ll have to see.
I also realized last night that I completely forgot about scripting. I need to create a basic script-language and interpreter to handle things like dialogues and cut-scenes. I’m really dreading it because I haven’t done any sort of planning for it; I’m not really sure where to start. I really wish I still had that source file I made back in high school for the artificial reasoning program I wrote to play turn-based strategy games. It had almost exactly the sort of script interpreter I need. I think I’ll put it off for a little bit and work on frill animations instead. I can work on planning out the scripting while I’m on watch later this evening.