Gather round, friends, to hear my tale of woe.
I had a pretty good plan. I knew more or less how everything would work, so two weeks seemed like an enormous amount of time to implement it. How badly I misjudged. What I currently have done might generously be called a day's work. What, then, did I spend all this time doing? Wbat indeed.
First things first: My original movement system had good obscode, but was brutally slow and inefficient. It became clear within a day or two that I'd need to handle movement differently. However, I wasn't sure what the best way to do obscode was with the movement system I was then envisioning. I'm still not sure. I spent virtually the entire first week fucking around with movement and obscode, and I never
did get pixel-by-pixel tile clipping working properly. Currently, entities are unable to slide along walls at a 45 degree angle to their direction of movement. They just ram up against a diagonal and get discouraged. Even worse, entities get stuck when trying to move diagonally along diagonal walls, and the obstruction system gets fucky at very low movement speeds. I could easily have spent the entire second week dicking around with this, but I wasn't sure it'd be any better, so I decided to just leave it as it was.
With my crappy movecode in place, I went on to more interesting parts of the system. Here again I decided that the way I had planned to manage things (which would have required something like 10 layers per map) was retarded, so it took about a day for me to decide on the best way to handle the obstacle, zone and stuff layers and implement that. By midweek, when I made my 'giving up' post, all I had done was a little testing room where the main guy could walk around and poke another guy with a sword. There was no excuse for having so little done after that amount of time, and there was so little to do that it wasn't really worth downloading and unzipping, so I figured there was no point in trying to meet the deadline. Grue encouraged me to release what I had come Friday, however, and after some persuading I agreed to do so. You might, then, be expecting to see a demo where the main guy can walk around a little testing doom and poke another guy with a sword.
But no! After another day of testing, I found out that even that didn't work right, and since the swordcode was only a temporary fix anyhow, I decided to excise it entirely and redo it in a hopefully less-broken way. However, last night I got laid out by a surprise cold, and this in combination with homework kept me from doing a damn thing. So all you have is a guy who wanders around and gets hit repeatedly. And for some reason that I can't be arsed to look into right now, only one of the two entities moves at a time. Great. Now, I'd planned on putting conveyor belts in today, because the system can accomodate them easily. However, I ran into another weird bug that I have no comprehension of that prevented me from even doing that.
I could put in another hour or two on this, but at this point I'm too sick and tired to give a damn. So
here it is. If you are wise, you will
not download it, because it is a piece of shit that provides about 10 seconds of gameplay. If you do download it for whatever reason, don't look at the code. If you do, you will regret it for the rest of your life.
And that is the story of my albatross, the recalcitrant Zlike. I pray that I can tame it in future weeks.
