In the past few months, Dance of Death has seen rocky progress. Development momentum came to a crawl while I took a brief break after work got particularly busy with an Oracle/Ironman 2 project that completely tapped my AS3 mana reserves for a few weeks.

Recently, however, I’ve made slow but steady progress, and am down to the last two features for version 0.4! They are: saving/loading game state and ranged combat.

As far as saving/loading goes, I implemented options saving/loading firsthand to get a taste of how I would structure the SharedObject-based system. In AS3, the SharedObject class allows you to save data locally to the user’s computer, although, unfortunately, all classes are stripped from the saved objects, which are restored as vanilla Objects that must be recreated as their original object types manually, since casting is of little help.

After having gone through the motions with the saving/loading of the Options (keybindings only at this point), I foresee the rest of the permanence implementation will be time consuming— since there are so many moving parts, player, dungeon, monsters, items, etc.— but not difficult. I will tackle this feature last.

I haven’t given the ranged combat implementation much thought, to be honest, but I will be fleshing it out in the coming days as I start working on it. At a quick glance, there are a few prerequisite features, such as item stacking in the inventory (for arrows), that may be required to get ranged combat going. Although, to be honest, that is the only one I can think of! I’ve already got routines for drawing lines and a [L]ook system that I can replicate as a targeting system…

…ah yes, animations!

That will have to wait. 😉

Stay tuned for 0.4, tentatively scheduled for this week!