Kit's Blog

Music for the game's title screen has been added, making my cover of Erik Satie's Gymnopedie Lent et Douleureux the first addition to the Cambria OST. I also added footstep sound effects for the player character, and am currently working on a HP system. Afterward, I will add basic melee combat before finally getting around to the map loading system. If I can't finish the map loading system by Canada Day, I'll release what I'll have as Cambria_alpha_indevbuild_01.5. In the unlikely case that I have time to spare before Canada Day, I'll even add overworld music. Today's blog was short, but I assure you... great things are in the works.

Cambria_alpha_indevbuild_02 is going well! I found a way to eliminate the green dots that were appearing around the sprites. With some help from a more experienced programmer, I was able to implement better AI and a better collision system for the rover enemy. There was a bug that caused the entire program to freeze when a rover entered its "idle" state. There was also a bug that would cause the rovers to speed across the map and flicker intensely. There were also several instances of rovers locking themselves into one place, usually a corner. Finally, there was a glitch that caused the rovers to jitter around when idle or when they were colliding with a block. I kind of liked this feature as it made them seem more robotic, but it was ultimately patched. Next, I'm going to add a trigger system that causes different maps to load when the player exits the currently loaded level. At that point I'll be ready to release the second alpha build. Expect it to be released on G...

I switched back to PyGame after having too many problems with Java. I got to work on a pre-alpha build with the help of ShawCode's tutorials. The pre-alpha build was temporarily available on GitHub, but was deleted once I published the first alpha build. Here's a list of changes in the first alpha build compared to its predecessor, the pre-alpha: -Added block collision -Added player animation -Added rover enemy, rover AI, rover animation, and rover collision -Added intro and game over screens There are two glitches present in cambria_alpha_indevbuild_01 that I'm aware of. The most obvious one is the green dots around the player and rover sprites. The image rendering system I'm using doesn't recognize image transparency, so it just renders it as black. I filled the transparency in my spritesheets with (0, 255, 0) and I used a colour key feature to eliminate the green that surrounded the sprites. As you can see if you play the alpha build, it isn't 100% effective....

 I compiled and ran my first Java window today. Nothing special, just a black screen, but I must say... I'm really proud of myself. I'm familiarizing myself with Java and Eclipse, which isn't the most difficult thing to do considering I've dabbled in Python and Javascript prior to picking up Java. Eclipse has probably been the best IDE I've used so far, I greatly prefer it to Visual Studio Code and I even prefer it to IDLE, which was my IDE of choice when I was developing in Python using the Pygame module. I've created six Java classes so far and I love the way they're organized in Eclipse. It was a little intimidating at first, sure, but when I got over it... I really got over it. Before I retire to my quarters for the night, I'd like to also mention the recent leak of Windows 11, which is something that greatly surprised me, although it's also something I think is long overdue. I don't think continuously updating one Windows forever and ever is...

Today was the day, Nintendo broadcasted their E3 presentation. I didn't really care about most of the announcements, but I'm really looking forward to playing Metroid Dread. I've only played a little bit of Metroid NES and Super Metroid and the outdated controls kind of turned me away from the games, but with the modern polish of Metroid Dread, I think I'll really enjoy this game. It might even incentivize me to play Metroid Prime 4 if that ever actually comes out. I continued to try to successfully compile my C++ SDL window and I finally decided to give up. It's way beyond my learning curve for now, but I might return to it later. I've started experimenting with Java using the Eclipse editor and I'll be doing more of that in the days to come. -Kit

I'm not dead! I just had nothing to post for a few days. I gave C# another try earlier today only to become once again pissed off by .NET, VScode, and the different application types (UWP, console, windows form, etc.) so I decided to finally settle on C++ as the programming language I'm going to learn so I can code my dream game. Come to think of it, this is the first time I've mentioned my dream game on this blog. I'll talk about it more in other posts. I had already tried to install a C++ compiler yesterday on Windows but that was incredibly tedious. I decided to install Ubuntu onto a virtual machine and it was much easier to use than Manjaro since I had used Ubuntu for a few years and I hadn't used Manjaro until I ran it on a VM. The warm glow of Ubuntu made me feel very welcome; it felt good to be back on my beloved distro, free of Microsoft's proprietary grasp. I installed the gcc compiler with ease using the apt package manager, the one I was used to unlik...

 I got a response from the ReactOS forums today. It turns out I had just made a silly little mistake. I pressed a key when I shouldn't have, and it led me to the system setup. All I had to do was wait for the screen to transition rather than press a key and it would boot to desktop. I played around with ReactOS for a bit. I made a text file and drew a penis in their drawing application because my maturity levels are simply unmatched. However, I wasn't able to figure out how to install a browser and test different websites. I'm pretty sure there is a way to do that but I have yet to figure it out. -Kit

 Well I'm continuing this blog for a second day... kind of quaint to be utilizing such an outdated form of media sharing. People mostly convey their daily thoughts through Twitter or YouTube. Twitter is as bustling as ever but sites like Tumblr and Facebook are slowly losing traction. (Good.) The only reason Blogspot still exists is probably because it hosts a lot of non-blog sites. I would've used Google+ instead if it hadn't shut down, as Google is probably the most tolerable corporation that maintains social applications. Of course, Google+ is indeed no more so I took to another star in their constellation of sub-brands. As a side note, my parents each used to have a blog and it's how they met a good chunk of their friends, although that medium of friend-making has probably long since died down. Now to the main topic of today's post, VirtualBox. If you, dear reader, aren't aware of what VirtualBox is, allow me to provide a brief summary. Essentially, it is a ...

 I left Twitter yesterday because of its subscription service. To be fair, I'm already part of other social media sites that also have subscription services like Reddit and Discord, but Twitter's new service was more of a last straw, considering all the toxicity the platform is known for. I don't know why I decided to come to Blogger/Blogspot instead and this blog may not last but we'll see what happens. -Kit