Banged-out two episodes of the tutorial today: creating the interface, and items & inventory.
Basically, I can now communicate with the player AND give the player shit to pick up. Whoo-hoo!
I’m starting to get a little judgy about how the code is architected, though. I was curious to know if the toolset I was using had in built-in tools for pop-up interfaces, and the answer is … kinda?
I now have pop-up windows for both message history and for my inventory. I was expecting those to each be part of a new class of some sort, but nah, each of them is a bespoke entity crammed into the code which processes commands and figures out what to do next. That just seems sloppy to me; I would have expected those windows to be their own thing, somehow.
That HP bar WAS its own thing, but I know that I’m going to want a mana pool of some sort to power the player’s spellcasting. So I’ve already refactored that into a more generic component so I could get the mana-point bar in there. (Right now, it’s purely for show; I definitely haven’t implemented spells yet.) They’ll likely be joined by an XP bar at some point. For the final game, I don’t think I want to use an experience-point-based progression system, but for the early going, it’ll do.
I’m also a bit confused by the decision to make all items default to being “consumable.” I’m hoping that’ll get rolled back later in the tutorial.
So, yeah, I’m seeing a whole bunch of shit I think I’m going to refactor after I get to the end but before I get into my own version of the game hot and heavy.
But, still. This game is coming together, and that’s really cool.