Rebuilding Heroes of Might and Magic 1 [Episode 34]: Battle Screen with Hex Grids, Sprites & Cursors

In this episode, we build the battle screen for our Heroes of Might and Magic 1 engine rebuild in C++. Starting from the original game's assets — reverse-engineered sprite sheets, ICN archives, and battle background files — we use AI-assisted code generation (Claude) to bring the battlefield to life one prompt at a time.
We walk through the full 35-hex tile grid layout, faction-specific hero tents and banners, combat cursor logic (move, fly, attack direction, not-allowed), creature stat dialogs, and the General's Options menu including surrender, run, and spellbook. Along the way we tackle real bugs: wrong palette loading, broken ICN decoding, misaligned sprite rendering order, creature ID mismatches from a scrambled CSV lookup table, disappearing cursors, overlapping music channels, and the AI's persistent tendency to hallucinate portrait sprite paths.
By the end of the session we have a working battle loop with movement range highlighting, animated creature glows, attack direction cursors, and the post-battle summary dialog — with solid forward progress despite the usual two-steps-forward, one-step-back rhythm of AI-assisted game development.

Видео Rebuilding Heroes of Might and Magic 1 [Episode 34]: Battle Screen with Hex Grids, Sprites & Cursors канала The First Hero of Might and Magic