December 4, 2000

Randy Glover just made his first post on MidnightRyder.Com in the diaries section. Too cool 🙂 More on current game progress, negotiations with Summit Software, etc., inside….
Ya know, it’s just plain too damned cool to have the author of your favorite game ever posting stuff on your company site. A huge thanks to Randy for deciding to pick up on doing the Developer’s Diary thing – funny part is, I found out about his post on Jumpman Lounge before I even saw it here on MidnightRyder.Com! I’m really inteterested to see what Jumpman II becomes – I think Randy’s will end up being a revolution within the Jumpman games, in the good way! If you haven’t read his post, it’s definitely recommended reading – he explains what he’s doing, intellectualy, as a plan for Jumpman II.
Well, I fooled around with the website this weekend some, so I didn’t get quite as much done with Jumpman: 2049 as I planned on. However, that’s not to imply I didn’t work on it, or accomplish anything. I started off by taking a blank project and starting from scratch to integrate VBA into the shell of what was to become J’49. Hacked at it a while, and got it working. Then I loaded up my old prototype Jumpman level displayer, and executed the VBA integration wizard. Holy smokes – that was just tooooooo simple! Basically, it does everything for the integration for you. You pretty much just keep hitting the ‘next’ button, and it’s done. Now, that doesn’t make everything within the project scriptable – far from it. You still have to do that (that’s a good thing – otherwise, well, if everything is scriptable there could be problems. Some internal items shouldn’t be messed with 😉 From there, you just make all the Let and Get’s for the objects within a module for it, and that acts as a bridge between the application and VBA. Fairly freakin’ cool!
Anyway, I got it back to the point where it displays the classic Jumpman levels again, and began working the object model that end-users access through VBA to program new Jumpman objects and levels. I’m actually going to try and make the process as simple as possible 🙂 The real problem, for me design wise, is what belongs in the core, and what should be scripted items.
I’m really thinking about going the Unreal Tournament route for things – in UT, damned near everything is scripted when it comes to gameplay and objects. That way, level designers for Jumpman: 2049 can pretty much go wild and do anything they feel like! However, Jumpman himself will not be a scripted object – there are variables you will be able to change from within a VBA scripted level.
Ok, back to work – I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me 😉
Midnight Ryder
AKA Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr
“Gettin’ ripped off,
“Gettin’ took.
“I tell ya people,
“It’s harder thank it looks!
“It’s a long way to the top,
“If ya wanna rock & roll…”

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