First of all, thank you mightily for the front page post Gayo! I figured the
sidebar was more exposure than a tech demo really warranted, but I won't be the one to look a gift horse in the mouth. :D
I have no specific attachment to that font, really... so maybe I'll look into a better one. ONLY TIME WILL TELL! :O
Also, as for actually finishing Geas, I will momentarily break my self-imposed rule (I call it the Anti-Romero Rule: 'Don't talk publically about anything that isn't already at least mostly-done.') and talk about some things that I've decided on the future for Geas...
Foremost, I have no desire to sit here on Geas for the next century and a half with nothing more out of me. Instead of waiting until I've completed the whole game, I've broken the story into chapters. I'll view each chapter as a milestone, and build them sequentially. Meaning... when I finish chapter 1, I'll release it. It'll be like a fraction of a completed game every few months (or whatever) instead of one large-assed game sometime after the year 3000! Of course, I will lay down the save game format before the first chapter comes out, so it won't be necessary to start over for each chapter or anything stupid like that. And as a means of judging size... Chapter 1 will basically be a somewhat expanded version of what I planned for the HoV, with everything beyond that being new material.
In addition, I've managed to generate a fair bit of interest in Geas and I pretend that my friends are violent enough to come rend me limb from limb if I casually drop Geas by the wayside. I am fully committed to going through with this barring alien invasion or nuclear meltdown or something. This I swear, upon this red crown, the source of all my dark powers...
That said, a few notes about the tech demo that Gayo didn't mention:
Please read the readme included in the zip! It tells the sordid tale of this HoV-entry gone long and why it took me so long to put out a tiny demo. Also gives proper credit (unlike my HoV documentation which I wrote when I was sleep deprived and pissed off at my lack of progress). I'd also greatly appreciate any and all feedback, even if it's just 'I really like how you do skills' or 'Your combat is waaay too cumbersome'. And I know that Tanessa's pathfinding is completely broken. ;)
Second, here are some keys to play around with:
-
L adds a new 15-second (if I recall correctly) lifespan light to Kiel. Don't hit it too much, since there's a hard coded limit of active lights that will crash the game if you overflow it.
-
F7 turns the lighting engine off. It's
really slow (bad enough to make my 1ghz Athlon start to have noticable slow down). If anyone wants to take a gander at the poorly commented code and offer suggestions as to how to improve its performance, that would be swell. (Check out the end of tick() in system.vc)
-
F9 and
F10 reverse and speed up time, respectively. You start out at dawn, so if you want to go back to night time or to noon or whatever and don't feel like just sitting there for a while, you know what to do.
- Various other keys do things for testing purposes... I believe F4 heals your party, F2 damages it, F3 gives you an automatic win in combat (when no menus are up) or adds experience when a character's status screen is up, X shows obstructions... they're mostly just for my use, really, but if you want to play with them then check through the source code.
Again, thank you Gayo, and thanks to everyone who's shown their support for Geas. :D Don't hesitate to drop me a line at
speveril@northknight.com or post publically. Once I'm finished my exams and homework for the semester, I'm devoting what time I'm not LANning, camping, or spending time with the family to working on Geas, and hopefully at some point I'll put up a page explaining all this in a more thoughtfully laid out manner.
