Taking a break from coding topics, today’s post explores how Icefall’s dialog User Interface (UI) has evolved over the course of it’s development. My automatic-backup tool keeps every version of Icefall available, so I fired up a few old versions and took some screenshots to illustrate the process. Original Design This screenshot is actually from the
Icefall uses literally dozens of textures… (and it will probably be ‘hundreds’ by the time the game is completed). Textures are used for everything, from the mouse cursor, menus, fonts, buttons, to the game world itself, spells/action icons, monsters, equipment… everything. Although my own main PC has 512MB of video (texture) RAM, not everyone does!
What’s a reasonable minimum spec to aim for these days? With Icefall, I’ve already taken the decision to target Direct3D9 – I get a lot of extra capabilities compared to DirectX8, and it still works with Windows XP unlike 10 or 11… a pretty simple decision. But what about in terms of video memory? And
Should Icefall come with an Installer/Setup program? My previous games (like the Five Hundred card game) didn’t require any installation at all: it assumed you had DirectX7 (the game just failed if you didn’t), and all of the files it needed were in the same directory as the EXE itself. You just unzipped it to
Virtually all programs have this, a central ‘game’ loop that grabs user input, updates game logic, redraws the screen. At it’s simplest possible level, it usually looks something like this: repeat Input; Update; Redraw; until Quit; The problem mainly comes in that middle section, Update. For any game, there are a variety of different states
Last time, we looked at the inheritance style of object-oriented programming in detail. Now let’s look at the alternative: composition. We’ll use another example from Icefall to illustrate the differences. Icefall has a central ‘world view’ that shows the player and their immediate surroundings (items, monsters, terrain, etc). The world view also shows animations (e.g.
Last time, we talked about two different approaches to designing objects for a game or application: Inheritance and Composition. It’s time to look at the pros and cons in more detail. Let’s start with inheritance. Inheritance When learning OOP, inheritance is what you learn! Create a common, generic ancestor-type class, and create new classes for
I’m working on the follow up to my Object-Oriented Programming post, but in the meantime I had to share this: I tested Icefall on Windows 7 for the first time today (having developed & tested exclusively on Windows XP SP 3 up until now). It worked perfectly, in fact it ran a little more smoothly
Like almost everything else these days, Icefall is designed around object-oriented programming (OOP) principles. Specifically, Icefall uses Classes instead of objects, although the difference is not relevant for this discussion. At any given time, the game will be operating dozens of different classes and hundreds of instances of those classes, with the majority of them
The next step in Icefall’s development was to decide whether to make the game realtime (like Diablo, Titan Quest, World of Warcraft…) or turn-based (Angband, Nethack, Ultima 1..5). This is probably the biggest decision for a role-playing game, as it dictates the entire gameplay, as well as the UI, multiplayer, everything. Initially, I looked at