Melee attacks, enemy bats and item drops such as extra health and mana have been implemented! What an exciting update! This may seem minor, but the functionality behind building an enemy template, implementing “self aware” attack boxes and hit boxes, and figuring out the logic behind the hero’s attack capabilities has been a bit tricky. Plus, there was the functionality behind adding the impact effects of the weapons, or when a bat drops out of the air and lands of the ground.

Now it’s on to ground based enemies. The fun part will be to make sure they know how to use the appropriate ladders to keep from being marooned a floor above or below the hero.

There’s a kid who plays this in class. How ridiculous is that?

So I got back from PAX on Monday night. It was my first trip to the convention, and quite honestly any reason to visit one of my favorite US cities is good enough for me. All I can say is “Wow”. It feels amazing to know that no matter how hard I try, I could never be as big of a geek as some of the people I saw.

Overall, I’d say I enjoyed the experience. Wandering the expo floor is a bit overstimulating. People were crowded together shoulder to shoulder. One booth was always trying to play their audio louder than their neighbors, each with so many screens rolling through blinking lights and whirling graphics. Epileptics beware. You feel your eyes bleed a little after a while.

I went with my cousin Matt, who I now see as a bigger gamer than me. He’s an MMO fan, so naturally we spent quite a long time in the World of Warcraft and Warhammer booths. He made a good point that the new Warhammer MMORPG is a shameful ripoff of World of Warcraft. Even the GUI looks exactly the same. Almost as if it were copy-and-pasted! Shameful!

Watching the authors of Penny Arcade do a live drawing of one of their strips was fascinating. Mike Krahulik showed the entire process, from writing the strip, to roughing it out, inking and coloring and finally adding the speech. All the while fielding questions from the audience, who as I mentioned earlier are so geek it hurts. The guy sitting next to me would laugh at every… fucking… joke, all with the same intensity, so that even if Jerry Holkins made a minor quip about what some cosplay nerd was wearing, my right ear would be assaulted by loud, goofy-like guffawing laughter. He also needed to brush his teeth.

I might go again next year. It wasn’t the kind of experience that would make me want to get a full weekend pass. I’m glad that I only went on Saturday. The panels were pretty mediocre. Most of them needed to stop goofing off and stick to the schedule. Finding tangible subject matter was like trying to squeeze juice out of a pomegranate. Thankfully, the geek stink wasn’t as bad as Comicon or my classes at UCI, though a few kids in the WoW booth definitely tried to make up for it. It’s very disconcerting when you can feel yourself walking into someone elses body odor. Blech…

Wow, reviewing some indie titles? I hear this game is nice.

Big update!

Here’s a video of an alpha test of Conjurer: Wrath of the Arcane. All the levels have been constructed! You get to see what a few stages look like in each level. I’m especially proud of the lava and ice levels. It’ll get even better once I add things like bubbling magma, stormy clouds, and sandy gusts of desert wind.

Next up is developing enemies, attacks, and bosses!

In other news… all the noise I’ve been rattling on about making my Actionscript engine a blit-based engine has proven to be a big waste of time. Shock and dismay! I was really looking forward to seeing a marked improvement in CPU performance by keeping all assets as BitmapData and drawing whatever I need onto a big Bitmap canvas. Turns out it gives the same kind of performance (or less!) as using standard MovieClips. Bummer!

Ah well, that’s how it goes I guess. Now I get to have fun developing the game’s enemies and bosses. This project is really coming together! Let’s hope I can get most of this project wrapped before Fall quarter starts up at UC Irvine.