Well, I am now five hours into my 40-hour RPG-

Oh, so you finally decided to do some work on this project, huh?

Okay, just who the hell are you, anyway?

I’m your superego. You know, the part of your brain that nags at you constantly about what you should be doing. You know damn well that you should have worked on this project over the weekend, but what did you do? You spent the whole weekend playing Soul Calibur III!

Really. Isn’t the superego the “parent” aspect of consciousness?

Why, yes it is! I’m surprised that you-

[BANG]

AUUUUGH!

Oooh, looks like you won’t be “parenting” any more.

You…gasp…you can’t do this to me!

In the end, it’s my brain, so…yes. Yes I can.

I’ll be back! You can’t get rid of me! They’re tricksy, false hobbitses! We must have the Precious!

Yeah, yeah. Now that that’s taken care of, let’s talk about the game!

I hit my first roadblock early on. I had expected that assembling the tiles off their various pages into one tile bitmap would take about an hour. It ended up taking three hours and fifteen minutes, partially because the Angband tiles I liked didn’t have the terrain symbols I needed, and I couldn’t find any others that I really liked. Yes, I wasted time Photoshopping some tiles together when ones I found on the net could have been used. I just didn’t like how they looked, and I want this game to be as good as it can be (I also don’t want it to look like every other quickie RPG out there). I don’t think the time was completely misspent.

I was then able to work up a map structure and a tile structure so that I could start putting the map on the screen. I don’t have any map data yet, so until I get some, here’s a look at the tileset I chose.

You may notice that I’ve only got 56 tiles so far…I’m reserving some because I know that as the project progresses the need for new tiles will come up.

Picking the tiles also dictated a lot of the game design. I tried to pick the most interesting monster tiles I could find, and to cover the basics of weapons, items and armor. Plus, I just couldn’t help but include four spell tiles in the game; hopefully I’ll actually have time to code those spells.

My next task will be to put together the overworld map and allow the player to scroll around it. I also need to finalize what the game’s GUI is going to look like.