Good evening watchers, fans, guests, whoever! This is Jacob Giambalvo, founder of Rendered World Games and lead designer of Dungeons of Daggerhelm.
Glad to see you're still paying attention to us. Its been a good week since an update was posted here. Development has been going rather slow lately, to be perfectly honest, because our programming language of choice, Java, has been throwing a hissy fit. Or, rather, that its too complex for my feeble brain to wrap around.
To be honest, I'm not the best at math. Nor am I good at math, or okay, or decent, or fine, or below-average, or bad. I'm not good at all. I'm terrible with math. And, as you might have guessed, Java has a lot of math in it. Even after it is explained to me by a tutorial series, stack-overflow posts, and even a close friend with extensive knowledge of Java, I still didn't get it. And I still don't.
The fact of the matter is that I've been busting my butt trying to figure out Java and how it works, and I recently admitted to myself that I simply can't and won't be able to do what I want with this game working in Java. I'm in the acceptance stage. Sure, I understand full-well that you can do pretty much anything in Java, and that's great; I just don't have the know-how or experience to deal with it. And I sincerely apologize if that offends some of you here, who have the aptitude to work in Java and get it. I salute you, brave soldiers of programming!
"Wait, Jacob; does this mean you quit? Does this mean goodbye to Daggerhelm?" HELL NO! I made a promise to Ryan Camus, our music composer, that this game will be finished one way or another. And dag-gummit, I've found a way.
After realizing my failure as a Java programmer, I began rummaging around the internet for a solution. I looked at Unity: a great game engine with a huge user base. However, that kind of engine seemed to me to be reserved for larger scale games that are in 3D and have all the bells and whistles. Plus, the licensing fees were a little discouraging.
I kept looking. I investigated Game Maker: Studio.
And, as I was least expecting, the heavens opened up and a beam of light shone bright across the screen onto my computer.
"Eh, its free. I'll download it. What the hell." <---- Best. Decision. Ever.
I tooled around with Game Maker: Studio for approximately six hours. In a row. And after investigating as much as I could about it, I knew that Game Maker was going to be something worth-while.
I made a few mini-games during that six-hour period: I made a platformer and a main menu (okay, not a game...). It was so stupidly simple that the toughest part was drawing the sprites for my characters.
I looked up YouTube video tutorials. There are hundreds of them. Most of the are for platformers, sure. But many of them were perfect for working on Dungeons of Daggerhelm. PERFECT. The top-down aspect, the collisions, the character swapping, everything. I fount a tut for everything that I needed to make DoD in Game Maker.
As you might have already guessed from my elation, I have decided to make the transition to Game Maker: Studio for the remainder of development. Crazy thing is that I already worked on it for about 18 hours, and I have 20% of our Java progress (which took between 3 1/2 - 4 months). I added music (cue Ryan), collisions, character switching, simple dialogue boxes, and rebuilt the Broken Shield Castle spawn area. I even made the animations better and smoother.
The game just looks way better. But don't take my word for it:
Ghost character that every player begins the game as.
