I did make progress on the next A Summoner’s Tale tutorial today. It was slow going. Life would be so much easier if I had a WYSIWYG editor for forms. I will likely end up creating one at some point. With how slow going it was, I decided to take a break and do something other than write about making games or making games.

What’s Next?

This tutorial is working on creating an editor for creating moves and shadow monsters. The first part is adding the extension methods to A Summoner’s Tale for the SpriteBatch class to render on Points. Then, it creates a check box control. At that point, I start creating the forms. The form that holds definitions was easy. It is only a handful of controls. The form for creating moves has been much more tedious, as there are a number of controls on it. I’m only about a quarter of the way through.

My Projects

I did not work on Shadow Monsters today, much to her chagrin. I did promise her some quality time tomorrow, though, and I plan to honour that promise. When I do get back to her tomorrow, the plan is to finish multiple resolutions in combat. I am also going to look into an interesting problem I’ve come across. The sprites that I’m using have different heights for different animations. It causes some undesirable flows between animations.

Final Thoughts

Progress on today’s tutorial was very slow going, painful even. It didn’t help that I did some rather silly stuff. For example, I forgot to add an instance of Xin and could not figure out why the events for my controls were not being fired. So let that be some extra free advice, make sure your input manager is one of the first components you include in a new project. Anyway, I will be back tomorrow with another episode of game programming adventures.

Cynthia