Some progress on KAGE

After my first blog post about it, I've already made a lot of progress. Here's a (very alpha) screenshot I took today:

What you're seeing here is a debug mode "actor selector" window. This is a screenshot on Linux so the actor window looks ugly as sin (it'd look nicer on Windows) -- but this is only available when the game's run in debug mode so you'll never see it as an end user. The game window itself looks the same on every platform.

The interactive bits of the game revolve around actors (things that do stuff, including the hero character and in-game NPC's). There are singleton actors that exist exactly once in the entire game world (this includes the hero(s) of the game), and the other actors may exist multiple times.

In the screenshot there is one singleton actor named "hero", and two dummy hero actors who aren't singletons but use the same sprites as the hero (simply because I didn't feel like making additional sprites yet).

The debug window there just lets you choose which actor you want to control, out of the list which shows every actor on every loaded map. And it works, and you can walk around as any of the three clones there.

I'm a day or two's work away from programming an event scripting system, which will make the game become more interactive than just walking around, and then I'll start trying to make an actual game with this engine. The rest of the details (weather effects and other nifty features like that) will come later, since I want to create a game and not just make an engine.

BTW, the graphics aren't going to suck as badly as in that screenshot. I'm using stock RPG Maker graphics just for development and will be replacing those, and programming an auto-tiling system so that the tiles will blend better and not be so square.