It’s been more than two weeks since I last wrote about my progress with the game. Back then I wrote a list of things to work on and I’ve been chipping away at it, to the point where all the bullets on that list is completed, save for one.

• The enemy should have some kind of movement.
• The enemy should be able to hurt the player. ✓
• The players hp should be displayed in some way. ✓
• Moving out of the action scene should transition back to the overworld. ✓
• The should be some kind of permanence between the different scenes. ✓

Doing this project is still very enjoyable, to the point of it being the main thing I want to do if I get ten minutes to myself after the kids are down for the night. In reality that doesn’t mean much work per week but I will keep to the idea of at least one short programming session per week.

(Yes, as previously stated this is very much a Zelda II rip-off.)

I continued to work on the game yesterday. My goal is to put at least some work into it every week. I would really like to have a more ambitious goal, but I would like it to be achievable, so therefore I’m keeping it small.

I needed to back up a bit and redo some things from last time. I did indeed have a character that could swing a sword, but that sword meant nothing to the game. Now I’ve redone it in such a way that the sword is a separate object that spawns on top of the player object. There are also a really ugly enemy. If the enemy touches the swords, its hp decreases.

Next up

I still have things to do from my list from last week, so here’s a revised version.

• The enemy should have some kind of movement.
• The enemy should be able to hurt the player.
• The players hp should be displayed in some way.

Stretch-goals

• Moving out of the action scene should transition back to the overworld.
• The should be some kind of permanence between the different scenes.

I spent a lot of time today on my game. I’d say that I’ve reached my goal for the day. When an enemy catches up to the player in the overworld, the scene switches to the action scene. There is a player object (with an ugly sprite) in the action scene and it can move left and right as well as jump and swing a sword. Whenever I put some more time into this I need to do the following:

• Moving out of the action scene should transition back to the overworld.
• The should be some kind of permanence between the different scenes.
• One or more enemies needs to exist in the action scene.
• Combat should happen.

I’ve been thinking about getting into video game making as a hobby for quite a while now and during winter break I finally gave myself some time to get into the basics. While Ebbe was playing with one of his friends in a ”play land” (not sure what to call that kind of place in English, it doesn’t matter) and I went through the most basic tutorial for GameMaker.

I will write more about this some other time. I was about to write something longer the other day but I felt like rather than spending time blogging about making a game, I wanted to work on a game project. That seems like a really good sign.