This has been my first whole day working on the competition I had hoped to post a couple of times today, at least in the competition thread but I have been far too busy!

Here is an obligatory screenshot! Although it isn't much different from the previous.


Concerns
I feel I have been working non stop but only towards the end of the day do I feel I have made any progress. I have had some concerns about my games ability to actually be fun or challenging without forcing some awkward rules or obstacles. It might be too difficult to design good levels too.

At the same time, I might struggle to get everything I want into the game before the dead line and if I have to redesign parts of it I definitely wont, sound may not happen at all.

Hold ups
To check I could actually make this into a game, I decided to add loot and an on screen display of what you had gathered. Just a simple piece of text at the top of the window. IT DID NOT WORK. I struggled for a good couple of hours trying to figure out why nothing was appearing.

I'm using GDI+ to draw text into a screen size image. This is then copied to an OpenGL texture which is drawn over the top of everything using a full screen quad and some blending. (Feel free to advise on faster or better techniques...) But nothing was appearing, even worse the game had dissapeared.

In the end I tracked it down to my UpdateTexture call, I was only calling it when I changed the text, which makes sense to me. The texture shouldn't be changing if the text isn't changing and GDI+ -> OpenGL is probably a slow operation so it would be best to this as scarcely as possible. It works fine though if I call it every logic update text changes or not... This will do for now, its how my other projects are doing it anyway and the performance seems fine.

Progress
I got quite a bit done today, I'll summarise instead of boring everyone:

• Added spike trap and loot container logic and placeholder sprites.
  
• Added loot score
  
• Added basic UI elements, loot, orcs remaining (I have changed the feel of the game a bit...)
  
• Added the "party" hooked it up to the player controls.
  
• The player can send out and collect orcs.
  
• Tidied up the loading code:
  
  
  • Assets are now located along side the binaries in an assets folder
    
  • Sprites and the animation definitions are loaded automatically. Shaders and other data will follow
    
  • The "map" data is now located in a file and not hardcoded.
    
    
    Those last few will make it easier to distribute the game when I make a first playable version available.
    
    Changes
    As visible in the screenshot and text above, I have at least temporarily changed the feel of the game a bit. Its now a band or adventuring party of orcs. I feel I can fit this to a story a bit better and have the level design a bit more brutal without it feeling a bit forced that a bunch of humans would be getting themselves involved in this. Also I changed the colour of the test character to be green, which gave me the idea. I feel better about getting something done and making it engaging to players this way. It may change back though.
    
    That's it for today, I think I have put a good 12 hours into this today and need a proper break.