Shaun Walsh, an experienced programmer in the process of learning Torque, has graciously agreed to be on the Arcana Manor.  Shaun is interested in conceptual code design, i.e. planning out how to implement various features, such how to program a magic system in which the player will trace runes and sigils on the screen to produce various magical effects.  This is a tremendous addition to the team given the difficulty of programming and how slow I am at learning it.

Shaun has experience in Php, C/C++/C#, VisualBasic, and a host of other languages.  As an example of his coding facility, here is what he was able to come up with very quickly regarding the implementation of the mechanic for tracing runes:

“So, this wouldn’t be an overnight project by any means. Your drawing of the spells to the screen is interesting. Castlevania for the DS had the same concept, but they had built in functionality for that. How it would work is you would have to have a file that stored 2d coordinates of the first mouse click on the screen (where he starts drawing) and then does a match function to determine the roundabout next point he would have to draw to, something like a direction map. Heres an examples

User starts drawing at 25,25

So, the computer would figures the next point is 25 points lower, and 30 points to the right so the next cord would be 50,55. Then it would go onto the next point. The file would look like this

0: +25,+30 (this is actually the second point)

1: +25, -30

2: -25, -30

3: -25, +30

4: END_SPELL

This would make a pyramid drawing. You would obviously have to make a buffing system that would make use of extreme math cause the user wouldn’t be able to click EXACT coordinates. I would think the closer he is to exact, the more critical the spell is. Obviously, some of the marks he would be drawing would be more complicated, but that’s just a basic concept.”

Something like that would have taken me hours to figure out, which shows why recruiting team members if important.  Welcome aboard, Shaun.