Designing the Game

The game development has been coming along really well. But now we've hit a couple of walls which are very annoying. First, I feel like the MSVC++ compiler is playing tricks on me. We have a file called "player.h". In this file we have three things declared and defined. Struct Attributes, Struct Staus and Class Player. Ok? ok. So now, I have a file "Item.h" in which I define class Item. All is fine, as long as I don't want to use anything in player.h. I do include the damn file, and all I get back is "invalid syntax".
Will is also having some problems. Apparently, everywhere he makes a project with the source, he gets the weirdest linker errors I've ever seen. I'm serious. On his computer, in CL^3, in CSUG. It follows him.

Excerpt from an e-mail I sent to Eugene.
Here's something to consider. The health bar is going to be part of something bigger. It's gonna be part of the Heads-Up Display. So you have the game running and drawing in the background, but the heads up display is everything else on the screen that is always there. So, among these things we would like to have the health bar and the possibility to display the characters attributes, experience, level information, etc.
So the functionality of the game will be more generally,

1. Update()


2. Draw()


3. Draw() heads-up display

The heads up display is going to be based entirely on the players characteristics, so imagine a class HUD(Player *p). And what it does is that it draws the heads up display always in the same screen location.

That should give us a good start on the things that are displayed on the screen.