Plan for James W. Hofmann

Stuff is on screen

[image=http://img477.imageshack.us/img477/7041/qcs10226kz.th.jpg]

Hopefully those tags work. Not really an impressive display, but there's really a lot more going on behind the scenes than just blitting the one tile and text. Both of those items are going through global manager objects; now that I've set them up, I can do these things:

-Load tiles and fonts from a "common" path and a game-specific path; when a collision occurs the behavior favors the game-specific resources
-Parse lists of tiles from a file named "list" in the tile path; for future compatibility it contains a version number. I'm not totally happy with the font situation, as I've loaded in every font at one size only. I might make a list file to attack that problem as well.
-Both of these are referenced through Python dicts(hashes). Tiles can be animated with any number of frames(but only the first frame is used right now) and a "global" animation speed is used; this allows emulation of the old top-down games.

After I do the animation and perhaps get a moving-through-map test running, I want to allow the user to build an interface for gameplay. In the first version there won't be too much room for variation; the controls and stats will be the same everywhere, the only difference is the graphics. The biggest difficulty here will probably be in the various sub-screens; there are endless ways in which you might want to do inventory or menus or dialogues. I'll have to think about what I can do to satisfy different needs.

And then following that the next thing is working on some editors for these various things: maps, tilesets, interface... the gameplay will come very near the end of the first version, actually; this is fine since I enjoy building the editors and making them easy to use :)