Some tenative progress

So its been a while and the first college meeting regarding the project is rapidly approaching. Having been pretty gloomy over the last while at my lack of progress, the last few days I have been finally been getting somewhere. Iv been busy putting the necessary behaviours into the game and slowly things are moving forward. Iv still got a rather large and annoying problem with the lava not working yet, but I hope to figure it out soon.

I also made some headway getting the character sprite looking a bit better. I will have to return to this again but right now it will do for making the rest of the game. Mendel Strone moves more or less as I want him to and he can also wall slide with should add a new dimension into the levels.

The major change has been me deciding to return to using a tileset rather than actor platforms to build the level with. I had made several tilesets already but found they didn't blend together properly and I couldn't work out how to fix it. So, stumped, I decided to go with the platforms. But I really didn't like how they looked and I had to create an detailed foreground to hide the construction platforms I was using to make the level. This was obviously a cumbersome way to do things. But then  I found a very good online tutorial in how to create tilesets and make them blend properly. Armed with this new knowledge I went and painted a nice rocky tileset. This looked much better and allowed me to make more interesting levels much quicker. It was also relatively easy to create details in the tiles to add some variety to the tiles. There is lots of scope for adding some interesting things to the rocks, so this could be a fun way to liven up the game a bit.

Anyway, while my demo of sorts will be most likely ready for Thursdays meeting, there is still lots of work to be done. Stencylworks still has many limitations and I'm still concerned it will fail me before the project finishes. Right now my working knowledge of it is improving and I'm able to move through it much more efficiently. So while the last few days have been very stressful, important progress has been made and the tentative seed of motivation implanted by my solving of the previous memory problem remains rooted and is gathering strength.

Stencylworks is a frustrating bastard but much more tolerable than its retarded cousin Gamemaker. It is currently the only real option I have if I'm to have an actual game by the end of this project.

So lets pray to the gods of digital code that she'll hold out for me until Magma Surge is finished. Namaste