Spent most of the week researching along a wide net of topics and disciplines, so while my notebook is full of ideas, the physically coded progress of ‘Bug has been slow to emerge. There’s something to be said for not overthinking/over-optimizing before you really get going, but I’m comfortable with getting these larger ideas conceptually sorted first. I’ll be posting all of my thoughts as I get closer to finalizing them.
☑ Sprite Movement/Animation – Animation is in. I’m using a sort of library of animations defined at compile time to reference when needed. This is better (more performant) than the previous Nambug’s object-definition specific animation system.
☐ Room Data Structure – I’ve only just started to consider this, but I think I would prefer a computationally compact way of storing rooms over a massive 1:1 collection of tile information. I think it’s especially important where the made up physics of the game are concerned.
☐ Screen Scrolling – I will use the same trick here as previous. Load the next screen into graphical memory as a snapshot of world state at those bounds just before scrolling the screen. Swap the graphics where the camera is (centered on zero) with where the new screen is. Jump the camera, move the player and scroll the camera back to center. It’s a cheap trick, but it works!
Thank you for reading! These will get more exciting as time goes on, but it feels good to be hard at work again. Stay tuned!