100 Experience Points
An Adventure in Indie Game Development

Day 3: 13 January 2013

7:52: I’m back for Round 3! I just wrote up my earlier post about it not being a sprint or a marathon, but a relay.

I did a couple of other things last night and failed to post about it. For one, I made a set of icons for the game (such as move, attack, guard, and a selection cursor).

I also spent a little time playing games. But mostly to see how other space RTS games handle giving orders to a ship. I now know a couple of ways that I can go about this next step in my game.

8:25: Nothing more to actually show in the game, but I’ve been working on some infrastructure stuff to get ships to move at your command. In the next Pomodoro, I expect that this will start coming together.

9:37: I’ve got ship movement working, plus an enemy1 destroyer drifting around. And then… I got distracted playing my game. That’s a good sign and a bad sign. (More on that another time.) That’s what I’ve been doing for the last 15 minutes.

Now I need to go set up real teams and make it so that you don’t get to automatically see where the enemy is.

10:31: I’ve gone through another couple of Pomodoros. I’ve got teams set up in the game. And now you can only see your own team’s ships or an enemy when they’re “within range” which is really poorly implemented right now. Ultimately the range a ship can see will be determined by modules on board each ship. For now they’re all 50. And yes, I’ve even got a magic number in there. In multiple places. I should really clean that up….

On the other hand, I’ve only got another two hours before I’ve got to leave for a few hours. I’ll be back later in the afternoon/evening for another couple of hours, but I’m figuring I’ve got a grand total of about four more hours before the weekend ends. I’d really like to have a little combat prototype to play with at the end of that.

12:00: I won! I’m the first person to ever beat my game. I just had two frigates seek out a damaged destroyer. Once they found it, my cruiser intercepted it and destroyed it. I was actually just about to take a screenshot of the destroyer being hunted down when it blew up2.

If only the destroyer could fight back. That would make things interesting…

12:02: I’m trying to decide where to go with this next. There’s still so much to do. And I’ve got another maybe 25 or 30 minutes right now, and another couple of hours later. I think I’m going to make bullets/weapons visible, and make the enemy able to fight back. (It already moves, it just doesn’t shoot back.) Then whatever time is left this weekend, I’ll probably put into doing cleanup and refactoring to make it easier to keep going. I’ll be honest, the code that I’ve written on this is not the best I’ve ever done. I’m more focused on getting a playable demo than anything.

The other big thing this is missing is the module system that will be very important in this game.

  1. It’s an enemy because it’s colored red. Other than that it is like one of your own ships! You can even tell it where to go! 

  2. And by blowing up, I mean it disappeared. I don’t have any sort of particle effects yet. 

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