Happy 2010, guys. The end of the year saw me looking for a new job; I won't get into the whole reason because it is a long story fraught with stress and unfortunate circumstances. In any case, I have a new job which is quite cool. Unfortunately, along the way, and with the holidays crashing into my life as they do every year, things were really busy and I didn't get a whole lot of time for Geas.

Every now and then I would pick it up, shake it around, and poke at bits though. In my last post I had just gotten the battle system started. Unfortunately, the internals involving targeting were kind of sketchy and the more complex I tried to make things the worse it got.

But, somewhat like being turned into a newt, eventually it got better. About fifteen minutes ago I finally wrapped up the last of the code monkeying and decided to turn one of my big headaches (the tidying required after killing a monster) into an avenue for new features: I'm going to leave "dead" monsters, just like dead player characters, on the battlefield as fodder for skills and the like. I think this makes a lot of sense seeing as one of my main characters is a necromancer.

No pictures this week, since it doesn't LOOK terribly different from the last time I posted.

Anyway, I mean to pick this up and start posting weekly again but time is a harsh mistress. We'll see. Either way, McGrue, just because I suck doesn't give you a free pass! September 21st, really? You were calling me out two weeks ago, going on about how you had so much work done. Where are the posts?

Edit: Okay, sorry, looks like Grue decided that his last post wasn't good enough for his front page. (Because his front page is sanctified in some way or something, I don't know. I guess maybe he's ashamed?) He's actually only a day behind schedule now.

Just noticed that my comments got hit by some spambots two days ago. I'll have to implement a captcha on the commenting thing when I've got some time, I guess. I was kind of hoping to avoid it, but I guess not! Ah well. Really, deep down in my heart of hearts I knew this would happen.

New version of Geas with all the changes I've made in the last few months since I've posted properly, including a battle system that sort of "works" but is incredibly simplistic and not especially fun.

Download this week's alpha release of Geas!

Discussion

Quite a bit has changed but it's not immediately obvious. Hit F1 to start a fight with some slimes. Esc exits the battle immediately, or you can just defeat the slimes. Only Attack is implemented, and anything else will just waste your turn.

I've also added a console that is currently not terribly useful but will be eventually, in theory. Since it was written to be included in KISSKISS it should be relatively simply to drop into any project, which means that we now have a (rather "feature light") console for VergeLua now. You can open the console by hitting Tab.

The other somewhat-interesting thing is that, yet again, I am using the newest version of the Verge executable, which is more up to date than the last official V3 release. This exe allows a couple of interesting things that Overkill has added and I haven't tried out yet, like allowing you to pass functions directly to the Hook* functions, instead of just string function names. It also allows you to use (some) control character escape sequences like \n and \f in VergeC, so font subsets are available to the VergeC-using masses again.

If you want to get just the newly compiled verge.exe, you can get it right here. If you do try it out with your project, please let me know how it goes, especially if you encounter any bugs.

The site is switched over. There are possibly some lingering errors but things look all right. Contrary to what I said earlier, the RSS feeds should redirect such that you don't have to worry too much about changing your feed subscriptions.

This change happened because I finally decided that Drupal, which I was using before, was just too large and required me to worry about it too much. It also took up way more space than it needed to for what I was using it for. So, being a programming nerd, I decided to write my own... sort of.

I kept hearing about Django and, while I'm not the biggest fan of Python ever, the little bits I'd seen seemed quite nice. I decided that both as a professional development move and also to clean up my cluttered, bloated site, I would rewrite it to use Django instead. This is "sort of" writing it myself because Django is more of a framework to make it really easy to write your own stuff, rather than a full blown CMS that will take care of your kitchen sink for you, like Drupal.

Anyway I've been working on this off and on for the last little while and now it's done. While I was at it I started adding other bits and pieces into the site to make sure it wasn't hard. Ironically, now that I don't have a CMS to hold my hand all the way through adding a new page, it's kind of faster for me to do so.

Anyway, now that this change is out of the way, I need to stop procrastinating on getting back on board with Gruedorf, and posting other miscellaneous things that I have to talk about.

Just a quick note: This site will be going down and then coming back up in a different form later in the next couple of days. If you follow my RSS feed, it will be changing location as well. I'll try to stick up some sort of note so that you can track down the new feed without too much trouble.