Day 5: Rocking Hard

I feel good about today.  I figured out some more about "if," "else," "elseif," and nested conditionals.  I doubled the size of the game world again - nay, more than doubled it, but I'm just going to keep track of how many times I double it since that time I said I wouldn't until 1,000 (or 1,024, to be precise).  The first couple days are easy, but those last few days?  Bite me.  Who wants to bet me on when I fall off the ball?  (Pro Tip:  I have pretty good control over when I fall off the ball... but it will probably be before 1,024 boards...)

To keep track, today I'm due for eight boards, and I have eleven.  So here is the whole game world, in all its glory:

I don't need to tell you guys to click for huge any more, do I?

I spent quite some time in GIMP, arranging all those screenies for you, my adoring public.  (Adoring!  ADORING, I SAY!)  Don't expect me to put that kind of effort in every time I've got a significant update - no, I made a separate layer for each board so that I can move all the pieces around like a game of Carcassonne, so updating the world with future boards will be easy as pie.  Which is actually kinda hard, if you ask me.  I mean, you need to make the crust, and have a tin or a baking dish that's at least vaguely pie-shaped, and you need your filling, then the top, and the top has to be pinched around to the crust (unless you're making one of those pies, in which case you can jolly well fuck off!), then you need to bake it at the right temperature for the right time which are interdependent variables, and when it's out it might have to sit...  But then you can eat that pie, and it is delicious.

A video game is a lot like a pie.  It has many pieces that come together into a delicious whole, unless it's a Zelda game for the CD-i, and it's hard to make one unless you know the whole process yourself or a faceless conglomerate hires you to do one monkey-stupid part day-in and day-out until you retire.  Not that I'm cynical or anything.

ANYWAY.  New features:

• Trespassing upon the farmer's meager field of flowers now gives the option to fight him or converse with him.  Fighting results in the farmer's swift and sure surrender; conversation results in quickly smoothing things over.  (The farmer still complains of further trespasses, whether you trounce him or smooth-talk him.  Deal.)
• That board (up in the game world) between the farmer's meager field of flowers and the road into the woods?  Yeah, that's the "plains," and it was always there - but in previous iterations it could only be accessed by travelling East from the road (because I didn't set up the board links right), and then you could go further East back to the farmer's meager field of flowers or West whence you came.  Now I know how the Lost Woods was made in the original Legend of Zelda game.  By extension, I now know how to make cube-world, knot-world, and even torus-world.  Inside or outside.  Because I have many skills and powers of a geometer.
• The plains have their own music!  NOTHING ELSE DOES, except for the title and start screens.
• Boards in all their 640x480 glory!  Plains 001, Forest 003, Forest 004, Forest 005, Forest 006, Forest 007, and Forest 008.

Bugs:

• If you try to go from screen A into screen B where the "joint" would cause you to step over a collision vector on screen B (see figure 1), you just kinda... walk... off... into Never Never Land.  I need to not make this a feature of my own proprietary game making software, if I ever get around to doing that.

Figure 1:  Attempting to screen transition from any of the arrows results in travelling off-screen.

By now you should know that you can click for huge.  I'm not telling you any more.

I'll have a bonus "interview" with an industry insider over the weekend, then we'll see what I've done by Monday evening.  I'm thinking... umm... sprite sheets.  Or scenery tilesets.  Something artsy-fartsy to get my mind off of all this programming stuff.  Either that, or more behind-the-scenes programming, where it's easy to make boring progress which is difficult to sex up into an update.  Not that I'm cynical or anything.