The Woebegone Trail: DevLog - Day 18 - Lost on the Trail ...

Entry posted by Torq in DevLog August 27

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Woebegone: An “The Oregon Trail” Homage - DevLog: Day 18 (08/27/24) - Lost on the Trail ...

I wanted to drop a quick update on this, as it has been two months since my last post.

I'll start that by saying that this is not a dead project, nor something I've abandoned.

Being "lost on the trail" is less being "lost" and more some (pleasantly but unexpectedly) extended travel, starting with visiting home for the (British) Silverstone F1 GP (where I grew up) immediately after my last post, and various excursions and sojourns since, along with a barrage of "summer activities", that only left a couple of days to do any useful coding. Now that's done, I have a few weeks before our fall travel begins and will be seeing how much I can get done in the mean time.

What I Worked On

Most of the two days were spent playing around with various approaches to handling the actual game, and especially how to implement its model and calculations. That included one wine-soaked evening's contemplating "maybe I should just do all the math/game-logic in BASIC"; a thought that was quickly put to rest. Then I played around with the OS' floating point routines, followed by creating some of my own math functions in 6502 assembly. And finally experimenting with an internal integer-only model, coupled with some 6502/macros to handle clean division and multiplication (which is probably the route I'll take, by adding them to my related utility/includes project).

I also spent some time trying to improve the initial graphics, including animating the oxen/wagon. As I've said before, I have no artistic ability - thus this proved extremely frustrating. It was not helped by my simply either not getting along with the available tools, or them just not being native to the platforms I'm using - and issues arising as a result. For example, I could use "Mode 4" here - in terms of what it does and how it does it - but on an Apple Silicon Mac, on the latest (non-beta) OS, it doesn't respond to clicks until I move the mouse (I expect it is an issue with a dependency, rather than the "Mode 4" code itself, but I've not had time/inclination to get to the bottom of it). Other tools require Windows, and are x86 builds - which then exhibit various oddities when run under Windows 11 ARM and Microsoft's x86 emulation.

I decided to put together my own character/tile/map editor (despite the tools I've already built/posted for working with the output of other programs), for Mode 4/5 and regular 1-bit/pixel modes, using a modern, cross-platform, framework (likely Tauri, since I've done enough with Electron for a lifetime) and that will be able to run in a browser from the web, or as a native desktop application for macOS, Windows and Linux. I'm not going to spend more time on "graphics" until that's in a useable state, but will work on the "game" internals of Woebegone in parallel.

What's Next?

Finish up the "title screen" aspect of this, including the cleaner, neater, clearer, bottom-panel
Finish decision making on internal model/math, and code up any necessary support routines/macros
Work on my character editor (subsequent "*" items are dependent on this being functional, if not "finished")
Animate the oxen/wagon*
Improve the parallax effect on the mountains/hills (will have two "distances" of hills/mountains, rather than one)*
Add scrolling landmark entry and bit-shifted (soft-sprite) elements (technical validation)*

There probably won't be much "visible" progress in the code (unless you want to peruse the repository) beyond the title screen aspect for a couple of weeks or so. So, once I'm at that point, I'll do another build and then things should be less staccato through the end of the year.