Day 35: 9 March 2013
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.
Just seeing all of the work that I need to do, I can tell that it would be incredibly unrealistic to think I’ll finish a completely playable version of the game this weekend. But interestingly, more than I have perhaps ever felt, I feel like I can actually complete an interesting, fun game by the end of the 100 days. It won’t have everything in it, but perhaps there’s room to consider having the “base version” free, and allow people to buy expansions with more parts, more campaigns, and more battles. Or perhaps follow the freemium model, and provide a free base version, and a paid-for full version that comes out later.
I’ve got a lot UI infrastructure to complete, seeing my mockups. But the good news is, the art will be easy now that I’ve got the mockups. Oh… and it helps that I went down a path that I can actually complete.
So I think that’s where I’m going to start. Kind of a fresh start with the Fleet Command screen, building the UI components that will be needed throughout the game. At this point, I’ve already got a good solid UI framework, and hopefully it’s easy to add on to it. We’ll see very soon now.
9:37: Well that half hour went by fast. It seems like all I’ve done is get my fonts set up.
10:10: I’ve begun creating my fleet command screen. I wish I had a template for creating a brand new screen. Maybe I should make one. As it is, I’m copying another screen and stripping out anything that I won’t need over there. I haven’t actually ran it yet. I’m about to do that now.
I also spent some time cleaning up my progress bars. Currently, the game only has one, on the loading screen. But from the mockups, it’s pretty clear that these will be everywhere. (Though is it fair to call them progress bars, if they’re not going to progress? In fact, many of them will regress as the game goes on and your ships take damage.)
12:36: Geez… I never realized how much I’d use my own tutorials as a reference when making a game. It’s a good thing somebody took the time to write all that junk up. Even though I’ve done it all before, it would take me forever to re-develop it all from scratch.
I’d now be happy with this weekend if I can get a functional Fleet Command screen working, especially one that allows you to select ships and jump over to the Shipyard to work on them. That’s well short of having a complete working prototype, but it would be a massive step forward, I think.