Oh well, I added the scroll buttons too now.

But now I'll call it a day. I personally like the sprite editor already. I took a character, separated the head, torso and legs (like with LEGO) and I now have much easier time changing these, and composing new sprites with the individual pieces.

Mission accomplished .

Hmm... a lot of progress today.

Ty, if you check out the SVN version, you'll find the Sprite Editor in SMEE to be now pretty much fully working .

I just have to add the widen buttons and the ability to easily move sprites left/right/up/down in the box .

Oh, and as with the tile editor, it will NOT have an undo button.

I am increasingly believing that undo buttons actually encourage the bad practise of making complicated and unreproducible sprites/tiles on the long term .

Well, first of all it will be entirely geared towards handling PNGs at 48x48 resolution, so the editor will be straightforward to use for other game projects.

If people like it, I'm also wiling to enable a 24x24 export, although I'm sure people know where to find the resize tool (it's extra easy because Shiny Sword Sprites are 50x100 with a 2 pixel width padding ).

So far it has all the relevant features from the tile editor, it can import png's and it can save sprites to png. Also, I just got an 'additive load' working.

The additive load will allow you to load a sprite, and then "add" its contents to the existing sprite in the editor. This is particularly helpful for humanoid sprites, because you can make 'head' sprites, 'armor' sprites, 'clothing' sprites and trivially reuse those in different contexts.

Later on, I'm also considering to put in a widen/narrow button, so that you can change the width of your sprite in an approximate manner with the click of a button (in the case of widen you will need to adjust the central row of pixels manually afterwards to reflect something sensible).

Making sprites is taking far longer than I'd like, so I'm now creating my own sprite editor, forking it off the tile editor. It will (again) feature a heap of buttons which are intended to make the process of creating sprites semi-automatic.

This is a running thread where I'll post any updates to the game worth mentioning since the beta release.


First contribution: removed a few teleport bugs and built the first in-game puzzle, as part of the Church of the Question Mark.

Known issues (a non-exhaustive list that will grow as I get more comments):

* Attack/shopping menus etc. are unreadable in the new resolution and need to be revamped.
* Plot is unfinished.
* The context menu for status, giving items etc. is largely unfinished (players can press the right arrow key for the give item interface, which does already work).
* Ranged attack animation is still rather weird, and should be revamped or tagged with an epilepsy warning.

Find it here:

http://ccs.chem.ucl.ac.uk/~derek/SSTDD-beta-2014-04-22.zip

It comes with 0 documentation, but it is essentially a compiled Java application. If you have the latest Java Runtime Environment (version 7) installed, then you should/might be able to run it by double-clicking Shiny_Sword.

All comments, feedback, contributions and hatchet jobs are welcome in this thread!


Basic list of features:
* 6 characters
* 7 battle scenes
* several shops
* three quests
* A partially working overland map
* Various spells, including fireball, blaze, tornado, heal and bolt
* Support for ranged attacks (animation needs some work though), backstabs, land effect and movement constraints.
* Support for saving and loading games.
* A pretty sophisticated system for dialogues, personalities and affiliations.
* A graphical map editors
* And almost all of this trivially editable.

Screenshots are here: http://www.shiningsource.net/forum/index.php?topic=1125.0

See title. Nothing to see here....

...yet .

Not at all. And I can provide more if needed anytime . I made rapid progress over Easter, so more stuff keeps coming up for the game .

Added descriptions to the interface, updated the overland map and have made preparations to reintroduce Kyra into the game. I'm forking the sprites from the old Kyra/Lace sprites, making a more boring one for Lace (she is meant to be more "boring") and sticking closer to Elv's original for Kyra.

Hi all,

Here are four screenshots to give you an impression of what's been added. Allow me to describe them:


1. Overland Map. Clearly a work in progress, but there are three locations available already.


2. Mine. There is now a cave to the south of Azrat and this mine is a part of it (note: the cave level starts off with a battle straight away, as this game is meant to be a bit nasty to the players ). And yes, you can mine Iron, but I have 0 intention to implement any grindy crafting system (doesn't mean you can't make good use of the materials though!).


3. Bandit Shack. Since some of you had trouble levelling up, I added a repeatable battle in Azrat crossing, where you can indulge in the slaying of female bandits and rats .


4. Archer attack sequence, using automatically generated indoor battle backgrounds. The Background color is sampled from the tile the attacker is standing on, as well as the nearest solid tile in view (the latter is used to paint the walls).

I do not make claims about the future, but as it stands the game has three overland locations, 5 party members, and 7 battle scenes. I can spend a solid hour playing it, so I guess others could do too already?

Giving items is now possible, although the interface is still very non-descriptive (will need to add more text menus ).

Made more progress with the walkabout menu, added more stuff to the Taziram map and added a cave level to the game.

Possibly, although I personally prefer a manual retreat move. That way, someone in the party will have to try to reach a square close to the starting point without being shot down/killed by enemies.

That will also enable the possibility to have battles where the objective is *not* to slay all opposition, but instead to sneak past...