Old Code and Glass Cannons

There's a well-known saying among programmers. "If you haven't seen your code for 6 months it might as well belong to someone else." Meaning that your own code will make a lot less sense if you haven't dealt with it in a while. It's been a while since I went through the chain of events that happen for combat. I tried to catch up while watching a TV show, but it just wasn't going to happen. I'll give it another go tonight without a TV show in the way.


Instead of complaining more about my code, I'll give my first impressions on an older game; Sly Cooper and the Theivius Racoonius. My first time playing it was pretty short, since I'd got a number of used games and wanted to make sure they all worked.

In the first stage I got a little confused because it apparently only wanted me to die when I was sure of safety. After my first heist I was attacked by a cop with a big gun. I was about to make a run past a bunch of cop cars to get into my van, but decided to hold back. The cop proceeded to shoot the same cop car over and over. I felt pretty darn safe since she wasn't aiming anywhere near me so I went into first person view to look around to see if there were any pickups or anything. I didn't see anything so I went to regular play, but before I could go anywhere I got shot and it was game over. She spent about 1 minute just blasting her own cop cars before finally aiming at me!

I was annoyed at having to start over so I tried to jump off the building. I couldn't. Then I got somewhat serious and started going through the level again. As I was going I jumped at the edge of the building again just for laughs and I flew off the edge and died again.

Whoops.

I played it again later since it turned out my copy of ratchet and clank had a scratch that wouldn't let me go further than I was. I rushed through the first stage this time and got to the main story. This is when I found out that Sly Cooper is a glass cannon. Very powerful, but can't take a hit. There was a huge enemy swinging a hammer that looked twice my skinny raccoon size that I took out with one hit. Then I saw some vines with thorns and I decided to hit them to see if they'd break and give me coins like a lot of other things were. Apparently the swing brought me a little too close and I was instantly killed.

Despite all my deaths I actually am beginning to enjoy the game. It's cutesy, but still fun.

Not that anyone ever comments on this blog anymore, but what do you think? Is it good to get an update of what's happening and a short game review, or am I getting too off-topic by mentioning anything but Darkened Dreams 2?

P.S. There hasn't been any art on this blog for a while. Peter, would you be so kind as to post some art?

Guest Post

Before you get all excited, I should clarify the title. No, I didn't get someone to replace me for a week. Jay at RampantGames unfortunately had to go on vacation in Hawaii (poor guy!), so I did a guest post for him. It's not great, but it's better than nothing. Here it is!

Display Redone

Okay, the creatures are no longer limited to being in boxes. Instead they spawn in a random location in a pre-defined space. Now we can see the large monsters with no problem!

Part of the reason that I had even set things up in boxed space was to make it easier for me to write the clicking code. The easiest way was to just allow a click on any part of the picture, even parts that were invisible (0 alpha). If pictures overlapped then it would be very easy to click on the wrong picture just because it was a part that you couldn't see and couldn't tell which was in front.

That's the other problem that I fixed last night. Now button presses will be ignored if they happened on something that can't be seen and will proceed to check whatever else may be behind.

Now it's time, finally!, for me to get back to working on the abilities. It's been a long time since I first was about to work on abilities, and I've changed a lot since then. It will be very satisfying to me to finish off the abilities because that means that I'll be getting past where I had stopped to look back so long ago. I'm excited to finish this off, get battles looking even nicer, and then move onto new things!

The big question is, what next? Should I focus on multiple maps (overworld maps and dungeons) or NPCs? What do you think?

-Califer