New project, but for real

 Okay, so I got tired of waiting around for other people to start working on a game, so I got going on a new project inspired by my love of AdventureQuest. Man, I can't believe it's been about 20 years I've been playing off and on. Basically, I wanted to try making my own point and click, menu based RPG like AQ so that I could better learn how to create and use resources and save and load data with ResourceLoader and ResourceSaver. You might have thought given how you actually play AQ that this kind of project would be easy. Turns out that, uh, actually, no.

No it is not.

At all.

There is. So. Much. Coding. Literally, because every element in the game is interacted by clicking, the majority of the game is just coded. Every button needs to do stuff, numbers need to be applied and calculated, and modified by another thing entirely. Like, the damage calculation for the player is based on player_data.strength vs enemy_data.melee_defense, but also is modified by (player_data.strength + player_data.equipped_weapon.weapon_bonus) but that's not all, for defense there will also be a player_data.equipped_armor.defenses[] and player_data.equipped_shield.defenses[] that will factor in, too. I'm basically hand building databases of stuff that needs to interact with each other, and this is just three basic examples. I haven't even touched on everything the enemy_data needs, along with saving experience and gold gained from winning a battle.

Basically, it's the most coding I've ever done on a project, and I still don't have a playable prototype ready yet. It's getting closer, but my definition of "prototype" is "Main menu, create/load save data, load town menu, start battle" and that's it. Still a long way to go before I have like, equipment menus, shops, and oh god the elemental defense system is going to have so much math THE NUMBERS! MASON WHAT DO THE NUMBERS MEAN-

Whew... I need a break. And an artist. I was planning to work on making my own pixel art, but I don't know if I'll have it in me by the time I'm ready to implement it. This stuff is hard.