I was hard at work today on tutorial five, 05, in my A Summoner’s Tale series to my Google Drive. Like the last tutorial, this tutorial works on graphic user interface elements. It adds a new control to the project, a list box. It also adds forms that we will be using to create the editor. I demonstrate how to use forms by making the main form we will use for building the editor and creating a simple message box that we will expand as we go. You can find the tutorial on my blog’s A Summoner’s Tale page. Also, you can access it from this direct link. The forms are a bit Windows XP-like in their title bar colour. Otherwise, they will be macOS-like in that the controls for a window will be on the left rather than the right.

What’s Next?

Well, I don’t know if I will have time this week for tutorials. Also, I want to spend time on Shadow Monsters this week. But don’t get me wrong, making such excellent progress on tutorials has been amazing. I would still like to make an equal amount of progress on my personal projects. Anyway, I don’t want to go off on my projects in this section. So, back to A Summoner’s Tale. I will tackle tiles and sprites in the following tutorial. I want to include tiles that I feel comfortable with the solution. I also want to find a sprite to use for the player character. I think I will skip character generation and just go for one standard character. It will just make finding something more manageable.

My Projects

So, I started talking about my game in the previous section. I want to finish it and make it available for people to play. I think, in a way, I have been procrastinating. Level design isn’t as attractive as writing code and tutorials. I’m looking at a minimum of eight one-hundred by one-hundred tile maps. That is hand painting eighty-thousand tiles, each with at least one layer, with most having two or three layers. So, I’m going to average it down a bit and say one-hundred and forty-thousand tiles are being placed. It is not insurmountable; it just requires a lot of work. That does not count for painting the interior of any buildings.

Final Thoughts

Well, I had quite a run of tutorials over the past week. I’ve finished and posted five of them. It was a lot of work but well worth the effort. It has energized me, and I’m not dreading writing code all week for work. It helps, too, that the problematic project I have been working on is winding to a close. I am starting a fresh one tomorrow. I have been avoiding Shadow Monsters because I haven’t liked the idea of content creation. It is a necessary evil, though.

So, I will leave you with these thoughts. I wish you all the best with your own game programming adventures.
Cynthia