4.17.2005
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There has been a lot of progress these days. A lot of work. We have decided to cut out some design decision we had made in the past. I think that a lot of due has to due with the fact that we either do not have the proper amount of time to implement the features, due to our time press. However, we are doing good. On Tuesday we are going to be presenting a strong version of our game, I believe. I'm positive that many people might be impressed, and it's mainly due to the scope of our game.
Me and Ethan talked today and we both agreed that we didn't know this project was going to be so big. But this experience will be good for that. We have learnt how to deal with issues like lack of art or experience with C++. For example, there's a lot of interesting art that we can use online, and Ethan has helped us find a lot of it.
A good gauge of our scope, I think, is the amount of extra data we have. Like for exmaple, art, config files, sounds and music. Truth be told, we have a lot of content that we are not going to have securely stored by the release date. The reason being that we use text configuration files to load maps, character stats and save the game. Such mechanisms could enable a person to hack up the game and make himself invinsible. At the same time, this "feature" gives the user the ability to modify the game at a more down-to-the-core level.
The code base is constantly growing. According to a line-counting program I have, our project contains > 7000 lines of code at its current state. It is true that if we had dedicated more time to a consistent design we might have cut it to less because we have a substantial amount of code that repeats. But let's face it, we didn't have enough experience with such large projects to be able to decide the amount of planning that would be needed, initial design decisions to make the code 100% readable or how long things might take. By Tuesday, I believe we will end up with more than 8500 lines of code, but maybe not.
Either way, it's gonna be a good game!
