Well.  So according to “the plan” By now I should have had 28 sheep wrapped and packed.

Turns out it’s more like 4, well.. not like… it’s exactly 4.

On the other hand, though, I do have 20 sheep drawn, inked and scanned ready to paint, and that’s good.  That was all last week but I’d qualify that as keeping up on the schedule.

So this week just didn’t lead to any real work getting done.  Worked on some freelance stuff and started messing about with what will be the marketing site for Mutant Sheep Eat the Earth! Which I’ve the photoshop files all ready to go on. And ninjababy has been taking up all the time that’s more or less left over at the end of a work day.

Baby Jude earns his Ninja Legs at 8 weeks.

So, I’m not gonna fret.  Just buckle down and give it another go.  And I’m gonna be a better blogger and actually post on a semi-regular basis, there’s actually a series of game related things I’ve been meaning to get put down.

For now.. It’s time to crawl into bed and plan to assault next week with renewed vigor.

The main Maze generation version 1 was put into place yesterday.  But the recursive backtepping algorithem .. er.. well it doesn’t branch enough. 

So I’m looking at adding some percentage of randomness to it, so that the further from r[0] it gets the greater the chance of it forcing a branch.  Not exactly sure how that will work in avoiding dead spaces. 

It’s either trying to get that working or either implement another algorithem. 

Referencing http://www.astrolog.org/labyrnth/algrithm.htm#perfect the table a bit down, is making me lean towards Kruskal’s or Prim’s Algorithem since they have a high number of dead ends and a low ‘river’ ie.. they don’t have huge long curvy passeges with few branches.  

Other than that, the actual game is already loading the metaTiles (maps from the web map maper) properly into the engine and using them to randomly build the dungeon based on the exits in the maze cells.  So some real progress has been made.  After I get a better maze generated it’ll be time to start hooking up doors based on triggers on the tile map so that’ll be interesting.  Hopefully I should have the next alpha available to play with in a week or so.

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.

Having a hard time with the initial mental gymnastics to fully embrace it but it’s gradually starting to make sense.

For now, though, It may be time to just take a break and take a look at some bigger picture items and play around with my paints while things gel.

Hopefully once I knock it out I’ll have the knowledge to use Joomla as a base platform for many many other things that I’ve got planned both at home and at work.

In completely unrelated news Robert Asprin and Lody Lynn Nye have released another book in the wonderful MYTH series called Myth-Chief..   Jeez come to think of it I’ve been following those for close to 15 years now..  Well here’s to another 15.