I read them too.

When you say camera system, what do you mean?  You mean like the one I brought up?

It's nice to get positive feedback when you're working hard, and I've noticed that I have been getting karma from these posts. But just any indication that people are reading my updates is a good motivator to keep posting them.

And no, the camera system refers to the fact that when you're on one side of the level, the rest of the level is off-screen, but if you move around, the rest of the level comes into view. If you compare the camera of the demos to HATPC's camera, you'll see that the demo keeps you strictly at the center of the screen, while HATPC's camera is more gradual and it eases in and out of movements.

END OF DAY PROGRESS REPORT

I have no progress to report today because I didn't get a chance to work on Aeon. Driving from Phoenix to Tucson is one of the most boring ways to spend two and a half hours...


Tomorrow, I'll likely tackle that auto-crawl problem like I was planning to, and hopefully get to work on animation as well.

I was going to comment on how it's more about how in hatpc you see more of the area hannah is facing, but you're right about the gradual thing. I remember how the view eases itself into place because that made it a little bit more difficult to break hatpc videos into sections.

I also wanted to inform you that driving south on I-95 through South Carolina is a more boring 2.5 hours. It's nothing but the same trees for 200 miles. At least if you're driving though a desert, there's no trees obstructing your view of the full landscape.


But driving north through SC is a bit more interesting because you get all of these billboards for a tourist trap at the NC-SC border, which are actually kind of interesting and noteworthy.

END OF DAY PROGRESS REPORT

Today I worked for 5.1 hours.

I decided not to work on auto-crawling but instead on animation, because that is a much more important feature to get done before the demo. Today I implemented the core animation framework. It was really a much more complicated problem than I expected, and I must admit that I really should've been more cautious with my initial designs. Perhaps the approaching deadline is making my work sloppy.

But using only the customization options that were mostly built-in already, I was able to get a fully-animated Mega Man running around the screen, complete with stand-by blinking animation. I got the Mega Man sprites from the following sprite sheet, which was dynamically loaded into the game as instructed by the level code: http://pistasj.net/r/t/gm/megamannessheet.gif

In the process of making my animation, I found that it really can be a pain sometimes to specify all of the animation frames manually. For example, rather than issuing a simple command to flip all of your sprites depending on whether the character is facing right or left, you have to define a separate animation frame for every single one of those other sprites. Hopefully I will make this much easier to use in the future. Or maybe all we really need is a user-interface to make things easier...


Tomorrow is polishing day. I'll be getting the game ready for the demo release, removing unnecessary testing code, adding built-in tiles, a pause menu that will show you the errors in your level code, and a default demo level.

Awesome!

END OF DAY PROGRESS REPORT

I worked for a total of 11.25 hours today. Like I said in the chatbox, I'll release the demo in the morning so that I can get some sleep first, and so I'll make this report short.

I fixed a LOT of glitches.

I added the ability to pause, and an entire pause menu. I had actually already made this menu for a previous version of Aeon, and I'm finally putting it to use.

If you load a level that has errors in it, the game will "pause" and show you the errors.

You can now edit the level code from the pause menu as well, and thanks to the incredible loading times, you can test them almost instantly.

Rather than leaving the Level Editor link on the homepage blank, I added a textbox similar to the pause screen's edit-level-code menu.

I added a really crude option that will let you edit the background of the level. And I brought back the white void for small levels, but it's more of a grayish white now so that it's not so harsh on the eyes.

Added two new styles: show-hitbox and hitbox-color. I imagine these will be very helpful in coming up with the perfect hitbox for an object. Unfortunately, they currently come up BEHIND the sprite for that object, so it kinda defeats the purpose, lol.

Fixed more glitches.

And I spent the last few hours designing the default level.

I can't wait.

I'm with Jell.

allowYoutube()? Will you allow walkthroughs to be viewed through the game or something?

That's for a feature that will allow you to stream background music from YouTube videos. If we do provide easy access to walkthroughs, it might just be better to link the to the video archive page, where they could post comments, if they wanted to.

END OF DAY PROGRESS REPORT

Today I worked on Aeon for almost an hour, fixing that glitch that stopped you from loading content stored on other domains. Flash player security issues sure are complicated.

The days of 4+ work hours per day are over. It'll probably be a few days until I start working seriously on the game again.

END OF DAY PROGRESS REPORT

Today I worked on Aeon for 2.6 hours, and it was the first time I've worked on the game in over two weeks. It feels good to get back to work.

So the first thing I did today was tackle some bugs. I fixed a couple of glitches that you might get when you try to quit from a level while it's still loading. They were really odd glitches, and I feel like they were threading issues, which is weird because ActionScript doesn't have threads, but it might have had something to do with all of the events that I was firing.

I also fixed two cases where the game failed to send out an error message when it should have. These were, in fact, glitches and not a result of me forgetting to to test for those cases.

Next, I fixed the <keys> tag in the level code to accept words rather than IDs for actions. For instance, you can now write "left", "up", "jump", etc, instead of having to memorize a meaningless numerical ID.

I also got to work on designing a way to make the customization XML more intuitive. I think I came up with some really interesting solutions, and I'm currently in the process of implementing them.

Next time, I'll continue implementing this change.

END OF DAY PROGRESS REPORT

It's been exactly three weeks since I last worked on Aeon, so today I got 3.6 hours of work done.

It's been such a long time since I worked on Aeon that this morning I couldn't remember what I was supposed to be working on. I knew that I was trying to make the customization options friendlier, but I couldn't remember how exactly I approached that problem nor how to continue it. Fortunately I had the progress report from three weeks ago to inform me! Unfortunately, that report wasn't very informative, but it did act as a clue for where I could find the designs for these "interesting solutions" I had found (they weren't where I was expecting them to be).

So here's how you draw a rectangle in the latest demo: But now you can save yourself some text and simply write this: If you want to include multiple images under one ID, you can still use the same notation as the last demo, but I'm renaming that tag from "drawing" to "group" since it makes more sense. The game will support both names, however.

With the most recent demo, you can draw shapes and perform all sorts of crazy manipulation to their image fills, but you can't do much with the actual shapes themselves. I wanted to add the same kinds of manipulation options to the full shapes, and I wanted these options to be universal, meaning they could be applied to shapes or even groups of shapes. Figuring out how to get the code to do this was a tough problem, but today I finally made it work!

The final solution involves some recursion and quite a bit of BitmapData manipulation. All I got working was the basic framework for the specific customization options, so next time I'll start adding these options.