Deadline met!

Woohoo! I made my own deadline!

The Sidebar is now complete as it shows the players current stats, keys, cash and all that crap. I made it so that you can specify which 'section' of the sidebar needs to be redrawn and everything else will remain as it is. This will hopefully have a positive inpact on performance as the sidebar doesn't need to be drawn every time the screen has to... and when one of your stats changes, only the relevant piece will be redrawn.

I hope I won't get such a boring task in the near future... because this hasn't exactly been the most exciting portion to write.

So my next step is: Combat!

I've been doing some thinking about how I want to do combat and I think I'm going to do something that combines Final Fantasy's "real-time turn-based" system with the whole "walk around on the battlefield" bit from Megaman battle network. I think I can come up with something that depends partly on your characters skills and traits but also requires a degree of strategy and forethought. I want to avoid a "encounter, instant-kill, rinse, repeat" method of playing so that combat won't become a bore as you become more and more powerful.

The levelling system has also been planned out now (although you can probably make out something already from the screenshot in my last post) and from here on in it's just a desiging and building process. I'm not quite sure how long this'll take, but I intend to have the "encounter a monster, get battlefield" done by Wednesday and a bit of actual combat by Monday of next week.

Progress is well, and I intend to keep that up! :)