Over the weekend, I put out a new end-of-sprint release of my game. One key feature this included was that the game now saves your fleet between sessions. This is a really big deal, because now, for the first time ever, you can start building fleets that you’ll carry with you forever.
Continue Reading →I’ve got some real information populating the infocards now. You should see things like your ship’s health and what it’s trying to do. There’s definitely some cleanup that needs to be done still, but I thought it would be worth a new daily build anyway. (After all, you guys who are downloading the daily builds know that it’s not intended to be functioning correctly, necessarily.)
Continue Reading →If you read my last post, you probably already know what I spent my evening on. Trying to get some things sorted out with where to save files at.
Continue Reading →Here’s the end-of-sprint release for your entertainment pleasure: http://rbwhitaker.wikidot.com/local–files/sprint-review/100XP-24March2013.ccgame
Continue Reading →11:42: I’ve been hard at work this evening building a framework for the infocards. These are the little things that will pop up when you hover over a ship or a part on a ship, and display the object’s details. This was something that was outlined in detail when I originally made my mockups.
Continue Reading →8:35: Here we are, the day before the midway point. I had seriously hoped to be much further along with my game than I am.
Continue Reading →22:58: Once again, I’d like to write more than I’m probably going to. Like I had hoped, I was able to get the modal dialog box up and running. New screenshots, and new daily build.
Continue Reading →Whoa… it’s a zombie day. I’m really tired tonight. I think I’m going to sleep.
Continue Reading →20:35: It seems like I’m getting started a little earlier than I have for the last few days. Good. Hopefully that means getting a bit more done today.
Continue Reading →21:11: It feels like another fairly late day, but I think there’s enough time to get some interesting things accomplished. Starting with getting ship parts to quit floating in the Fleet Command screen. I actually know what’s causing this (the way they’re attached in the Shipyard screen) and I think it will be fairly easy to address.
Continue Reading →23:52: It seems like my schedule was really messed up today. Lots of other things going on. But I really wanted to do a bit of game programming, so I pulled myself away from what I was doing at about 22:30 (I should have been sleeping…) to try to get something done.
Continue Reading →11:54: So I got up in the morning, all ready to program, but after only a few minutes, I realized that I was still way too tired to function well enough to write code. Or at least, code that did something useful. So I went back to sleep. Next thing I knew, it was 11:30. Now on to game making.
Continue Reading →I’m not going to write much tonight. I’ve spent a couple of hours tonight getting into some file saving and loading code. The saving works as expected, the loading, not so much. I’ve got it to the point where I can persist a ship’s name and hull number, but not any of the actual hull parts. Which is kind of the important part. It writes it all out, but it just doesn’t read it in.
Continue Reading →We’re already into the 40s! That’s crazy! On day 50, it will be the end of this sprint. I’m really hoping to have a basic, working, “complete” version of my game by then. If I don’t, then whether I can get something put together in the 100 days would probably be in serious doubt.
Continue Reading →23:01: I got two big things completed today. One is the right side ship details panel. It’s pretty cool to see your ship’s stats changing as you add things to it. The second one, as I said yesterday, is the implementation of text boxes. That way, you can type in your ship’s name and hull number. There are potentially an infinite number of other places that the text box can be used in a game like this, too.
Continue Reading →23:24: I’ve done a couple of smallish things today. I added in the weapon type to a weapon’s properties and made it so you could hover over the items in the module/ship part library. That’s pretty convenient. I also tweaked the color of the little progress bars, but most people won’t notice that.
Continue Reading →22:55: I just spent the last couple of hours working on getting the part of the display that shows details about the selected ship part to work. I’m actually pretty impressed with (a) how it looks and (b) that it turned out to be relatively easy to put together. Nice work on that GUI framework, RB!
Continue Reading →Here it is, a new release of the game!
Continue Reading →This sprint was so weird, I don’t even know where to begin.
Continue Reading →A few weeks back, somebody made a comment about being interested in seeing the class diagrams for some specific, complicated piece of the game. My response was that I’m following Scrum, which de-emphasizes design documents like formal UML, and emphasizes working code instead. That’s not to say that there’s no place for UML in Scrum. Sometimes there is.
Continue Reading →In response to my post yesterday with the mockups, I got some really good questions from somebody who has been closely following the development of this game. (I’ll leave out names, in case they don’t want to really be identified.)
Continue Reading →Holy cow. I didn’t realize I had written so much on this blog today. How’d that happen? It’s like I wrote the entire works of Shakespeare. Or at least a novella or something.
Continue Reading →9:01: Considering how late I was up last night (about 3) I’m a little surprised I’m sitting here. But as soon as I woke up the first time, my brain began racing, and it was impossible to go back to sleep. There’s a chance I’ll crash in the afternoon, and need to go take a nap. Geez. That sounds like something an old person would do. Or a little kid. Whatever.
Continue Reading →19:45: Here it is now, in the evening of an attempted reboot of my game.
Continue Reading →One of the hardest things you’ll face when making your game is deciding what you’re going to do. And what you’re not going to do.
Continue Reading →Once again, I have little to show for today (besides my previous blog post), but that’s because I’ve been doing some longer term planning and designing today, in preparation for this coming weekend.
Continue Reading →21:32: I’ve been spending all of this time doing the art side of things and being frustrated, as you can tell from my last few posts.
Continue Reading →Again, sorry for a short post. I actually spent very little of my time on my game today. There were a lot of other things going on today. (It’s a part of life, right?) I began outlining a possible path forward with my ship appearance stuff that I think could work. I should get a chance to try it out tomorrow, and whether it works or not, I’ll give you a quick glimpse into that possibility.
Continue Reading →Nobody told me about the emotional roller coaster. Though I wish they had.
Continue Reading →23:01: I don’t have much to write tonight. I’ve actually been working on trying to see what I can do to make my 3D models look nice, but this is going to take some time. It’s probably not good to spend so much time on something I already know I’m not that great at when the last couple of days have already been bumpy.
Continue Reading →6:42: It’s the final day of the sprint. Sundays usually mean getting less done than Saturdays, but that’s fine by me. I’ve already completed everything I planned on doing this week plus a lot more.
Continue Reading →This is part 2 in a series on unit testing your game. Part 1 can be found here.
Continue Reading →7:16: Another weekend! Saturdays are usually the days I get the most done. But first and foremost on my list is to clean up the tasks that are remaining in my sprint backlog. That’s writing a post about what to focus on when unit testing, and make the battle/combat prototype more compelling. The interesting thing is, it used to have an enemy destroyer that you could blow up. I want to go back to that. It should be really easy to do, since it was there once. I just want people who download it tomorrow to be able to get the teeniest tiniest feel for what it is like. Both of those should be extremely easy to do, and here’s to hoping that they’re both done by 8:00.
Continue Reading →I have all of these things that I’d really like to get videos of on this blog. Some things just work better in video form, instead of image form.
Continue Reading →6:27: First, I reach the 25% mark, then it turns into March? What’s going on here?! The hourglass would appear to have too wide of an opening, and all of the sand is just dumping through to the bottom. I don’t get it. Where’s my pause button?
Continue Reading →