Hello all. I am currently working on a simple mouse oriented shoot-em-up / rpg - Kind of like Diablo, but with guns. My problem is that I''m not too sure in what direction I should be heading. I have coded a graphics engine, a scrolling engine, a pathfinding engine and a basic switches engine (for opening doors, turning off security cameras, etc. kind of like TRiggers in Quake) Now where do I go? I know that in the full game I need inventory system, enemy AI, game rules (like shooting, chance to hit, etc), different predefined weapons, etc. Pretty much what Diablo has, but simplified. So what should I do next? There are so many parallels where I would need to have done this before doing that, and so on in an endless loop... And before you advise me to code a game like Pong or Space Invaders as a first project, well I have and they don''t provide much experience on collaborating more complex aspects... Anyway, I hope someone will be able to help me. wiseGuy

I think your next step would be designing the overall layout of the game logic and code. Try to achieve a modular design. Think about which aspects can be separated from others and how. You already mentioned the inventory system. Could that be separated from everything else but the character''s stats? Could you make the game support a queue of ''actions''? These could be attacks, ai decisions etc. Then you could use this framework to implement AI, and different aspects of the rules system.

Once you have managed to make the design, you''ll have to build the framework to support all this. This is tedious work at best, but after this part is finished, you can start with the fun stuff, without having to worry about the global effects of every single thing.

Thanks.

I''d kinda done that, but now I have done it really and truly, and *Most* things don''t rely on each other...

...my problem is that I cannot get pointers to work over different files...

(why use pointers? it''s quicker than making a copy of a large data chunk!)


...oh well keep trying I suppose

thanks Gefilus!

Umm... what kind of problems do you have? Check out the ''File Splitting (Externs/Headers)'' thread in the ''General and Game Programming Discussion'' board. It might help you out.