In my experience as a programmer, I've seen people write program specs and seen the finished result, which usually bears little resemblance to the spec. In fact, the best specs are usually written after the program is finished!

With that in mind, I wrote the prototype of Keepers before I wrote the design. Luckily, my work on the Zombie Simulator has given me a pretty good understanding of Irrlicht, so I was able to hack together a decently structured game engine with all the basic screens setup.

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Bear in mind that the graphics are placeholders, so it's going to look a bit different when it's finished.

As usual, I had some challenging problems bending Irrlicht to my will, not the least of which was trying to figure out how to do the scrolling levels you see behind the doors. Initially I wanted to do it the way it was done back on the Amiga, which is to basically to assemble the screen from graphic blocks and store it in a buffer off-screen, then as the image scrolls, just draw the blocks down one side as they come into view.

To achieve this, I created a render target texture, drew onto it, then copied a block the size of the screen onto the current view. It worked great too, until I tried to accurately map an on-screen position to the the corresponding location on the map. No matter what I tried I simply couldn't get it to work reliably, it'd always be out a few pixels. After struggling with this for about an hour I realised what the problem was - the render target texture was being stretched vertically by a few percent, so that my nice square 24 x 24 pixel blocks were being drawn at 24x26... AARRGGGGHH!

In the end, I just redraw the all the blocks for the screen every time it gets refreshed, since realistically, we aren't living in the days of the Amiga anymore, there's CPU to burn for 2D stuff, so no real need to mess around. I'm kind of hoping the same is true on the Ares, should I be lucky enough to win one!

The Great Hall

I had a bit of spare time so I modeled the Great Hall and rendered it. The first image is what it will look like in-game, the second is a side view showing the actual model.