I got the Health and Mana bars working. Right now I'm working on getting some of the basic story written since the next things to work on either depend on the story or will be major components to add and I don't have the time to get into them.

Check here for discussion on the game.

So I changed the tile drawing code so that the player is always in the center of the screen. It will now load a map much bigger than the drawable screen and just pick the tiles it needs.

I also added collision detection. It should prevent the player from moving too far off screen, since that will cause some null pointer errors. It will also prevent the player from walking over walls, water, and mountains.

A little bit on map design. For this game there will need to be at least 7 tiles on every side that the player can't get access to. So like the player could be on an island and have 7 tiles of water off the shore. This is because the screen has to draw 7 tiles past the character and it needs you to place those 7 tiles so it doesn't freak out and crash. The other thing is that you can create rectangular map like 25 tiles high and 300 wide. This will allow me to create a bit more flexible world.

Next up I will be working on the chat box to give me a place to toss debugging info and a place to put combat info and conversation info. I will also finish up the character stats info and finish up the health/mana bars.

FilesStats is updated and working. Here is some sample output.

So with a test and a paper due tomorrow did I do any school work last night? No. Instead I worked on my little FileStats program. Excluding the recursion it works great. For some reason it can't figure out which files in a directory are subdirectories. So once I figure out that little bug it should work great. Then I think its on to finishing up the graphics engine (if you can call it that).

Over the last few weeks I've been working on a Dragon Warrior 1 clone. I haven't gotten too much done, but I do have it drawing map tiles, the hero and some text info on the screen. I'm currently working on getting the collision detection working for the things like water and mountains.

The next few things I'm going to work on are getting the large map support in. Right now it only loads and draws the whole map. I want it to be able to load the whole map and only display a certain grid of tiles arount the hero. After that I will be adding a text box of sorts for things like combat spam, npc conversations, and debugging info.

My future plans for it include, npc interaction, random encounters, combat, itemization, map to map transitions(i.e. going from the world map to a dungeon map) among other things.

The current source code is in my svn server. You can obtain it from http://ferby.no-ip.org/svn/rpg. Down load the folder and then open a command window or terminal and navigate to that folder then type "java rpg" and that should do it.

Keep checking back, all my updates for it are going to be here. I'll also post current stats of the project (number of files and lines of code) in my future entries.