However now it’s full steam ahead! GFW is moving in next week and tons to do around the house before then.
Playing a bit of the Sims 3 and it’s very good and a radioactive black vortex that you can easily dump seemingly endless amounts of time into.
Then as soon as live gets settled and the summer excercise routine gets picked up again (ate too much on vacation and now I have a bad case of Bahamian Guilt) then I’m itching to spend some time wrapping up the monster painting that’s been hanging unfinished in the kitchen for 5 months now.
So, I’ve been running around in the total overwhelmed mode for a while and it’s time to steer the frantic caffinated ADD besotted herd of cats that is my attention span back onto track.
Some basic concept art got created, and then I wandered off the project to illustrationland and then got mired down in EPIC project full of GRAND ideas etc etc and just essentially spent some time thinking myself to exhaustion. Time to think less and do more.
I’ve made a list damnit! With a great big list of bite size (a week or 2) tasks to do. I’m going to pick one and just do it and then simply rinse and repeat. Theory being that this will decrease the amount of time spent bashing head on desk/wall/art table/sidewalk by not getting overwhelmed by any one thing or medium.
Well ok so I’ve got a valid excuse for not getting a whole lot done over the last week.
However, I did manage to get the whole loading, saving, entry and displaying of high scores implemented.
So.. that’s a plus. Still a couple bugs to work out but 90% there. Next up … hmm.. not exactly sure.. maybe I should iron out some details so I can see what I need to do before calling it Finished.
Just ran across a pretty good article on Game AI and how it’s all smoke and mirrors as opposed to real AI and a brief introduction to some of the basic concepts, such as finite state machines etc etc.
Pretty good introduction to the topic. The full article can be found here: http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/2009/03/05/how-ai-in-games-works/1
Its been a bit of a slog to make much progress. Tons of little ‘try this.. er.. hmm well how about that.. ooh that broke it… humm well then how about ….’
BUT the upside.
The player now triggers doors when he/she walks across em. (yes the collision polygons need some tweaking but basically it works). This causes a recusive floodfill to determine all the tiles that are available inside the room. There was an issue where it caused the game to stutter while the fill ran but with the use of some scheduling calls I actually wound up with a smooth and more even area determination.
So.. why does that make me happy?
Well, glad I asked.
So now I have a nice and easy way to get all the available tiles in a room, with just some minor tweaks the monster spawner (in the inital Alpha) will be able to find an open spot and start spawning critters.
Esentially I’m just a few minor tweaks from having a playable core base to work off of.
Then I can start going crazy with different monsters, powerups etc etc.
Got some good progress done. The online Map editor is coming along nicely with some new additions such as, saving to a database, generating exportable content files for integration into Torque. Still I need to do a couple things to it, mainly bulletproofing the submitted maps to make sure I don’t forget to add doors, things are sealed properly etc etc.
Ok so pretty good weekend. I decided to have the main game dungeon created from larger macro tiles. so instead of having to come up with a super complex dungeon generator, all I’ll need to do is to have an algorithem that just connects the larger tiles together.
So Friday and Saturday morning I sat down and wrote this
It’s essentially a tile based map editor. It doesn’t have any real fun features such as checking the validity of the map or verifying that the only open tiles on the outer edge are by the designated exit area.
Spent some time Sunday getting the data exported from the page into the Torque Game Builder engine, which wasn’t hard at all. So the game now can render macro tiles. Problem is that the collisions don’t seem to be working properly.. so that’s the next task.
Been spending a good bit of time on TED.com listening to the talks, there’s just so many facinating talks on so many cool topics, that I just had to jot down some of my favorites.
Made a pretty hefty chunk of progress over the weekend and last two nights.
Some behind the scenes work with putting everything in the level controlled by a manager object that keeps track of what’s going on and what to spawn next.
Off the top of my head:
WSAD controls work.
Money powerup (yellow dots)
Magic powerup (blue Sigils)
monsters drop money and score interfaces.
New guis
Basic fundamentals of waves are in place.
Object thresholds are in place so (in theory) it shouldnt crash due to too many simultanious spawns.
As always this is an alpha build, play with it at yer own risk.
Graphics are primarily placeholders.. No there isn’t any sound yet.
Talking a couple days away from the biggo painting.. Kinda mentally stuck on what to do with the blues..
So I’m diving head first into another side project. Which I spent the all of yesterday working on and plan on spending the evening on (after working out) to hopefully have a workable single level.
It’s all so much fun, it’s hard to pick just one project to focus on… Which, I guess, is why nothing ever gets ‘done’.
