I said yesterday that I was going to be busy today, and unlikely to get any game development done; that turned out not be entirely true.
I was busy. I spent most of the day with my stepfather helping out with some DIY — planing and rehanging doors, putting up shelves, drinking coffee — that kind of thing. It was nice to get to hang out with him for the day, just the two of us. Normally I only ever see him along with my mum, and often I only see them together with my sister, so it was good to share some time that was just us — even if we did spend it humping doors about. Doors are surprisingly heavy.
We were done by about 5:30pm, which left all of the evening free.
First, I made a sprite for the Rat King, the end boss of the first dungeon. I’m no pixel artist, which is why I’m using Quale’s Scroll o’ Sprites, but I was able to make up something by merging together a couple of existing sprites from the sheet. I’m pretty pleased with it.
After that, I started work on turning NPCs into merchants who can buy and sell items. I honestly expected this to be more complicated and time-consuming than it turned out to be, but it’s finished now after only an evening’s work. I guess I had a solid foundation of item-management methods, and the years of experience writing e-commerce software didn’t hurt either. I’ll save the details for a proper dev post at the end of the week.
I’m going to bed happy and tired.