Hi,

here is a small update on the development status of The Fire of Ardor. The biggest change regards the engine. I introduced the Entity-Component-System (ECS) pattern for the renderers (UI and raycaster). This means that renderers (which were treated differently before) are now usual systems. There are several articles about the ECS pattern on Gamedev.net for further reading [1].

A visible change is that there are new sprites (see screenshots below):

The meat will be dropped by defeated rats. The player is now able to collect items (currently health potions, mana potions and meat). After playing a sound, the item disappears from the level and it is stored inside the player's inventory (which doesn't have a UI yet and thus it's not visible).

The gargoyle sprites are renderings from an old Blender model I created several years ago. I edited the Blender render output in Gimp so that it fits the overall pixelated style of the game, although some additional work might be necessary in order to reduce black pixel artifacts. The gargoyles look different from certain view angles. They consist of 16 single sprites. The correct sprite is determined by the relative position and rotation between the camera and the entity.

The next steps will be implementing a conversation system (a text box is already shown in the first screenshot), as well as  creating a UI for the inventory in order to view and use the collected items.

Thank you for reading!

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[1] Articles about the ECS pattern (random order, more or less random selection) ↩︎