Taking away the graphics (for now)

Entry posted by Rick · November 16, 2013

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[EDIT]

Now with sound!

I'm making a game that revolves 100% around old school final fantasy battle style fighting. I thought about what often slows me down and kills my motivation in games I've tried to make in the past. My conclusion was that dealing with graphics (models, UI, animations, etc) often slows me down in various ways. So as an experiment for this game I'm going to first code the entire core gameplay in a console application with a basic text based interface first.

I'm hoping this will allow me to quickly tweak the battle system to both balance the game and make encounters fun and challenging.

I'm also taking a very iterative approach to making this game. I wrote down the basic idea of the game and I'm leaving the details to be defined as I'm writing the code. I write the basic functionality in a crude way, then I go back and factor the hell out of that. Rinse and repeat until I get something I think it fun.

I'm hoping that once I have the core gameplay done in this manner that transferring the code over to C++ and introducing graphics via LE won't be a ton of work.

Below is a link to a very raw implementation of a battle. It's in .NET so as to be developed quicker since it has some built-in features like text color to help describe things more while in the console environment.

The blogs have been pretty dead lately so thought I'd just share something