Day Three
Today was coding day. Had to write the Makefile that converts Inkscape’s SVG to PNG and packs all images into a texture atlas. Then set up the basic application with Haxe and Heaps to draw everything onto the screen, plus loading the font to draw text. Pretty basic stuff.
One thing i still do not have resolved, and has been a problem each time, is how to run scripted scenes. I believe coroutines would be a good fit, but Haxe does not comes with support for coroutines, and all the libraries i know of are not yet updated for Haxe 4.3, that i need in order to correctly hot-reload code in HashLink. I had to resort to closures with manually keep state between runs. Probably would have better ergonomics with macros, but i do not know enough of Haxe macros to do it, and during a jam is certainly not the time to try such things. I have no doubt it will bite me in the bottom at the worst time.
I knew i should have done all this before the jam began, but i did not, and now i have to put up with it.
Unfortunately, i enjoy programming way more than drawing, so all of this ate away at the afternoon, and when i realized it was already time for dinner. Also time for a least pleasant task for me: animations.
I am bad at art. And even worse at animation. Thus, i needed shy of five hours to do a basic walking animation for James. This is the result.
Walks a bit like a robot, but that’s all i can do for today. And is probably not going to change much in the final version, unless i have spare time at the end, which would be the first time.
This screenshot is already of the game running. Notice the “This is a sample text” at the top to test the font, and that everything works. This is actually the scene i used to preview the animation in game while drawing: i save the file in Inkscape, make automatically converts it to PNG, and Haxe live reloads the animation.