Aeges Road's First Weekly Update of 2008

I hope everyone had a good holiday season. I enjoyed myself. My only regret is that it was so busy that I was unable to complete a milestone I had hoped to hit on the first. Fortunately, I have found some time this week, and might finish it up shortly. The crunch right now is that I return to college work next week, and need to get as much done as possible. Luckily, this new class has not been as difficult as my last, and I was able to work on Aeges Road.

Aeges Road is almost in a fully playable state. It doesn't look very pretty, but that will come. Combat is nearly complete, I recently disabled the enemies attacking me so I could balance out some stuff. These last two weeks have been very exciting for me. I have been working on this game in chunks, so all the combat has been based souly on base stats and pre-programmed attacks. This is actually the second time I have written combat for the game, the first write was unbalanced and almost impossible to make quick adjustments. The new combat code is much cleaner, and I have been tweeking it for the last few days.

I have also been working on gui's for the game since the contest began. I have developed four different gui's for stats and skills, and two inventory gui's. There were also other odd gui's I played with, either to test out TGB or I don't know, it's been too long, but the codes still there. :-) I finally got the inventory system working either in late November or early December. It wasn't until this last weekend that I finally got equipment tied in with the stats system and the combat system. It was very exciting, and quickly showed me a few problems that have since been eliminated.

Yesterday was also an exciting day. For the first time since the contest began, I have a skills gui and it is tied in with the stats and combat system. On paper, it was difficult to see how well skills, stats, and equipment would work together with balance. It was pretty lame at first, but with about 3 hours of playing around with it, it seems to be pretty well balanced. While there are still a few odds and ends skills to tie in to their system it shouldn't take too long to tie off loose ends. One loose end was the locks and traps mini game, but I had a brainstorm last night that fixed an idea I have had for a long time. This weekend I hope to start on and complete the locks and traps system. The idea is very simple, and will make obvious that fact that I am a fan of David Bradley's games. I thought about posting concept art, but I would rather just post a screenshot of it in action. The graphics should be pretty simple for it.