And so the second day of NaGaDeMon begins, and already we've got a bit of graphical progress to report- though just a bit. Admittedly, a lot of it was spent browsing for sprites- now, look, at first I have to admit I was a little hesitant to go sprite shopping on itch. Everyone wants their games to have all-original art and unique looks all the time and all that, right? But I'm no artist, not in that sense, anyway, and it's either go find some available art that I can either freely use or purchase, and use that instead. And what I've learned is that a lot of indie games out there use some fairly popular art packs. I've recognized art from more than a few actual fairly big name indie games out there on the marketplace, and it makes me feel a little less like a potential fraud- I don't need to have fancy original artwork (especially not this early in the game), just something usable enough to build around, and then we can polish it later as needed.
That said, I wanted to find some sprites that at least matched the general early Sierra vibes I'm going for, and after a bit of digging, discovered this set of super low-res kinda gangly gobbos for just a couple of bucks, and picked them up to play with. Not a lot of animations on these, at least none that I'm likely to use, but they had good bones, and I figured I can stack three of them atop one another and I'm basically halfway there, right?
So, here's the first pass at the hero(es) of our game, sadly still without the titular trenchcoat, but we'll get there soon enough:
Sure, there's still a lot of work to be done- we need some freakin' trenchcoats, after all, but it's a start! And just seeing these little weirdos just stacked atop one another like that, looking absolutely idiotic, gaze vacant, heads absolutely empty of any kind of rational thought? I'm driven to near-tear in excitement to see them waddling about awkwardly- ooh, I think I'm going to have some fun trying to animate that bullshit when it comes to it, huh?
But I can live without animations for now, for now I need to get the bones of this game up and running, and that means doing a bit of Godot coding- which, sadly, I will have to get to tomorrow. The laptop I'm using to dev from on this one was out for repair until earlier today, and then I had another previous engagement in the evening that prevented me from doing a lot of work on the game- but that doesn't mean I did zero work. Sure, the bulk of the editing on the gobbos above was done yesterday, but I did create a very basic scene and a player object with that base sprite in place, and some initial scripts to just accept player movement up and down on a plane using WASD or the arrow keys- and a half-assed implementation of click-to-move that I stole from one of my training exercises from a previous course.
Then again, that's what those courses are for, so you can grab useful code from them and know how to use it to best effect, right? So once I've got click-to-move implemented, which should easily be tomorrow since I should have a lot more time to work on the game during the day now that my laptop is back (I missed you so much, my sweet, sweet little laptop), the next step is basic interactivity, and I should be able to post some code snippets and maybe even some minor animations, but, with the click to move in place, I'm already getting the position of the mouse cursor and I can check what's beneath it to know if an object or NPC is being clicked on, but I also want to be able to have this game be keyboard friendly, so maybe some kind of Examine or Interact button as well that scans the area immediately around the player object and triggers an interaction? Meanwhile, clicking on a character or object would move you to within range, and then trigger the action or dialogue or whatever- so, either way, we'll have some kind of Action object that receives the signal and sends it to the target. Hmm. I'll have to think about it a little but tomorrow I'll have the code to show for it.
