Soft furnishings

Another long pause in the dev. log - Sorry! - but it's recently been difficult to juggle work & home life with that of a retro-game developer.  There's also a strange psychological block in that I've been working from home now for nearly 15 months due to COVID restrictions, and so my game-dev desk has become my work desk, and so often when I try to do some work on MM it's a little too much like being back in the (home) office!

Some work has been done since the last update though - the design for the doors which need a key to open them has been settled upon and implemented.  We've got for a very obvious 'shape' for each key (square, triangle, etc) with a matching design on a solid wooden door, so they are immediately different to the usual doors.  I thought a lot about having coloured keys & doors in the game, but it would have been very tricky to get right, and looked rather odd given that the rest of the game is monochrome, but having a full-colour game would have invited so much colour-clash, and slowed things down.

Most of my time has been spent on 'fleshing out' the mansion - ensuring that all the collectable objects are in the right places in each room, that the trapdoors are positioned just right (so that you run through a door and fall straight into them, tee hee hee!), and that when you do fall down one you land on a nice soft rug.  I never knew that was actually a thing, and I'd played Atic Atac a lot in my teenage years, but its rather a nice little feature really.

I'm slowly working through all the rooms in the mansion and populating them with the right furnishings.  The PC version of MM is lovely to look at - each room looks to be unique, and I'm trying to keep that look in the Speccy version.  It can't be an exact match with the PC, but I'd like each room to be varied and interesting, certainly not like many other isometric games where the walls to each room are just a repeated image.  So far I've done two floors of the mansion - about 100 rooms - and inevitably had to do a bit of a re-write of how this is all stored as I noticed the available memory rapidly decreasing.  This took about a week (on and off) as I tried different options & methods, until I finally settled on a system which halved the memory for the walls whilst still keeping them unique.

Next up will be the furnishing of the caverns, as those look completely different to the upper floors and so require a different system to populate them.  Again, it's likely I'll shudder at the memory usage of it all, and try to rework the system, but that's par for the development of this game - the whole thing is a fight against the tiny 128K.

It's certainly time for another game-play video though, which I'll hopefully post up onto my Twitter feed sometime in the next week or so.