KnightEdit Progress

This is a bit of a sudden entry considering that, as a reader who has only followed this blog, the last bit of “progress” was a post about porting to XNA.

Well, in the months of absence, things have been going on. Mainly planning the future, and what will happen especially in these first few critical months.

A number of websites are being planned and made – one of which is considerably close to being ready. It will require hours of data inputting to beef it up, but it’s “quick content” – and certainly useful for it’s purpose. I will give more details when it is actually released, but for now, it really should become both a useful resource, and nice little revenue stream.

The meat of the money would come from the games – I hope. A lot of effort is going into them, and I have been tasked with making the Map Editor. After all, I spent quite some time using Valve Hammer Editor, FinalAlert/FinalSun, Duke 3D Build, RA2’s Map Editor, and a bit of UTEditor. Nothing much came of any work with Valve Hammer, but it inspired me the most. I liked it’s entity setups and naming scheme, and that is one key area of KnightEdit. The texturing controls will probably be very similar to VHE too.

So, why the name KnightEdit? For now, it is temporary, but if we don’t get around to renaming it, I guess the name will have to do. The name comes from the type of game we are making a ‘clone’ of – KnightLore, from the Spectrum, and Solstice. There are more games like this, but those two are the first that come to mind. The game will probably be more like KnightLore, than the others too – not graphically though.

The game is rather simple compared to most games out there today, but we chose this as a first game for a number of reasons – mainly because, it is something to give us an initial taste of writing games, and gives a good basis for general tools for creating bigger, more complex games.

Our biggest challenge is not the coding, but time itself – coding takes time. Time is money. Therefore, to gain more time, we need more money, and to get more money, we need more time to produce something amazing to make more money. To top it all off, the results from uni come soon, which could make a huge difference to time. The first reaction from parents would be to go and get a “full time job like everyone else”. That, will absolutely kill the game development. Time is running out, things need to be released, and money needs to be made, so we can continue our passion, and also make more money than we would in a “full time job”. Even if we are working longer hours than in a full time job – is a job really “work”, if it is also a passion? It is still a task, and takes effort, but it is a nice kind of work, not a “ugh, it’s Monday again” kind.

Anyhow, at this stage, the map editor can add, move, delete objects, handle different kinds of objects, and apply different textures to objects, and parameters to objects. It just cannot save a map…yet :). Entities are very close to being able to trigger each other.