Devlog #1.5: The Writing’s on the Wall.

Hey everyone! Welcome back to another devlog for my game engine made in Python: Olympus. Today, I added the hardest things to implement: text and collisions.

Text:

This is the one I struggled with the most. I wanted text while having the 16-bit style that I was going for. I tried displaying text using the SDL2 functions, but it didn’t give me the effect I was looking for. So, I had to make my own. And, it was tough. It didn’t help that I had no idea what I was doing, but it also didn’t help that I had many bugs. However, I was able to figure it out. I was able to do this by making each letter a tiny picture made of pixels and store all of the characters in a lookup table.

Collisions:

Collisions was easy when looking at it. Check of the walls or an object is colliding. if it is, do something. Otherwise, don’t let the player go into it. But boy, was it hard to implement. I spent a good 3 hours just trying to figure out how to do this. But, eventually, I figured it out. It works as the collisions check if two boxes overlap only if they overlap left-to-right AND up-and-down. If there is a gap, then they aren’t touching.

You can see both the text and the collisions in effect in the little demo I made below.

What’s Next?

I have a feeling that we are very close to being finished with this game engine, but I’m probably getting my hopes up. Next up, adding animations and tilemaps so that you can create levels. That’s it for me. see you later!