Where I am

You'd guess that after more than a year of development time that I'd have something pretty to show for my efforts.
If that was your guess then I can say you are sort of correct.
What I have is definitely not pretty (well, it's pretty to me), but it is at least somewhat towards looking like a proper game.

The Engine
Below is a screenshot showing my cute little zone that I use for debugging.
It is so amazing, I created it all myself you know.

Now, from the screenshot you can see a few things:
Firstly we have a nicely tiled map, with some rather ugly tile sprites (another thing I made myself)
It is also displaying the classic perspective of something that is in 3D.
Another thing, which is more exciting than the previous two things, is that there are NPCs wandering around. You can see the little guy at the top is walking east for some reason, and the little lady at the left of the screen has stopped (presumably to examine my not at all ugly grass tiles).
The character at the centre of the screen is the player, and happens to have the same sprite as the other NPC because that happened to be the one I randomly selected for debugging purposes.

Now, you may be wondering what those black dots all over the screen are, and I will tell you.
Those are trees that I broke (borked) in a recent code update. They were models that I created with vertexes that had colour information in them. Not long ago I slightly overhauled the drawing code to work differently, and now it won't display coloured vertexes. Hopefully I can fix that in the future, but that's not a great concern since most models will be expected to have textures anyway.

The engine also contains a semi-functional battle engine, cutscene and cinematic capabilities, a Lua scripting system, and many other more esoteric goodies.

The Mapmaker

You may now be thinking "but Ency, how could you possibly make that wonderful masterpiece of a zone?". Well, the answer to that is forthcoming.

I crea... no, we creat... no I created a lovely mapmaking application to go with the engine. It's working title is the LiveMapMaker, and that does a fairly good job of describing what it does.
It's main purpose is to give a graphical user interface (GUI) for creating and modifying the things that are run by the engine. Below is a screenshot, with my lovely debugging zone loaded up.


Currently it allows you to create new zones, change the sprite on each tile, place scripts on tiles that activate when a player steps on them, create and edit NPCs, and create and edit scenery objects.

In the design I have tried to arrange interface elements in a way that makes it easy to figure out how to operate the mapmaker.

There are still plenty of bugs, plenty of things that need to be implemented, and plenty of features that would make using the mapmaker a lot less painful. However, it is almost in a solid working state, and is probably enough to make some sort of 'tech demo'.

So this is pretty much where I am in terms of development. There have been many hurdles and challenges that I've had to overcome, and each one of them has taught me some valuable lessons.