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[Carefree games]

Also I might consider having the UI float over the screen instead of a big bar at the bottom - actually i was kind of liking the old version with very little on screen UI to be honest.

Agreed. You should consider this, Pirate Hearts.

[J. Kyle Pittman]

I ripped out my FMOD integration and replaced it with a custom audio implementation based on DirectSound and libvorbisfile. Not loving libvorbisfile for a number of reasons, but it works well enough for now. Don't really want to roll my own Vorbis decoder.

Maybe take a look at stb_vorbis - it's a minimal ogg vorbis decoder in a single C file, and is public domain.

Ooh, awesome, thanks. I'll definitely take a look at that. My biggest complaint with libvorbisfile (aside from random annoyances trying to link it due to the CRT) is how it handles reading content from an arbitrary location in a packed file. It doesn't have any native support for this; it just lets you overload its read/seek/close/tell functions to work around it.

Also I might consider having the UI float over the screen instead of a big bar at the bottom - actually i was kind of liking the old version with very little on screen UI to be honest.

Agreed. You should consider this, Pirate Hearts.

I have mixed feeling about the UI bar. To some extent, I like it because it feels like a throwback both to early shooters like Doom and to many first-person RPGs, where the first-person view was often surrounded by many UI elements. But on the other hand, it's a lot of wasted space right now. I'm hoping that once I add more features (inventory items, etc.), it will make sense to have a bar there all the time, but I'm not averse to making bigger changes if it feels right.

[Lizardheim]

You could always have it be on the side, next to the simulated tv on a seperate "screen"

[SolarLune]

Hey, what if it was on something else that was simulated, like a controller? Say, when you got hit in the game, the 'player' would raise his hands with the controller up, and hearts would be on it? That'd be pretty funky.

EDIT: The map screen could be on a piece of notebook paper, heh. 

[Masakari]

That is indeed an awesome idea, the problem would be for every other thing. If he's going for a Doom style hud, it means info on ammo, weapons, keys, that you can't possibly present on a pad or invisible all the time.

Loving this project!

[J. Kyle Pittman]

My biggest complaint with libvorbisfile (aside from random annoyances trying to link it due to the CRT) is how it handles reading content from an arbitrary location in a packed file. It doesn't have any native support for this; it just lets you overload its read/seek/close/tell functions to work around it.

So apparently, even though it's not documented anywhere, if you just hand libvorbisfile a FILE* to the appropriate location in the middle of a packed file containing an Ogg Vorbis file, it just works. Which is cool, but also a little scary. 

[J. Kyle Pittman]

Added a 5x5 portion of the world map to the HUD. Definitely gonna have to do a complete world map on a separate UI screen later, but this is a good start. Feeling pretty good about world traversal now...maybe I can actually get on to game features at some point, lulz. 

[Hangedman]

Love the HUD. Very neatly done.

I will say, leave in an option to turn it off, if possible

[Absinthetic]

I take it this project has been abandoned? Suddenly the thread went silent. What happened?

[J. Kyle Pittman]

Yeah, it's more or less been abandoned. I stopped working on it because I had coded myself into a corner where it was getting difficult to make even small changes, and I still had tons of features left to implement. I was wanting to switch over to using a component-based system for game entities, but refactoring what I had already written to fit a component model felt like the wrong move. Instead, I started working on a new project to test out that system, and that eventually became You Have to Win the Game.

I'd like to revisit The Understory someday, but I'll probably start it over from scratch if I do. In fact, just within the last couple of weeks, I've had some ideas on some things I would do differently. One of the bigger mistakes I made was in trying to procedurally plan a massive hours-long Metroidvania-style campaign, as this necessitated a quantity of features that I wasn't ready to support. I think in the future, I would focus on more of a short-form experience. I hesistate to say "roguelike" because that carries some connotations that I wouldn't want to be bound to (hardcore difficulty, permadeath, etc.), but I do like the idea of a game that you can sit down and play for maybe thirty minutes to an hour at a time and feel like you've experienced a complete — if bite-sized — portion of a game.