Designing the Game

Yes. Tomorrow from noon-midnight, CSUG. Sunday from noon-2am, CSUG. Productive weekend? I think so. We're going to tweaking AI, adding more enemies, setting up the levels, enemies, bosses, items, etc. It should be a lot of... fun. ;)

# posted by siz @ 10:28 PM 0 comments

Here's an interesting situation. Will has source. Will has configuration files. Will has most recent version. Will sends most recent version out. Szymon compiles Will's code. Szymon unzips all of the content files into their proper directories. Szymon builds successfully. Szymon runs the game and receives tons of errors that Will doesn't receive. Will can run game and play into the second level. Szymon can't make it to the loading screen. Fuck.

# posted by siz @ 8:04 PM 1 comments

I guess I was overly optimistic about this one. Man, that was a rough day. Over the weekend we spent so much time just working on this thing all day and night, working and trying to make this work. Staying up for more than 20 hours had its toll on me. At 7am I started doing stupid mistakes in every line of code; I couldn't concentrate. I got dizzy on my walk back home. Damn game programming is exhausting...

# posted by siz @ 6:47 PM 0 comments

We should have that song playing for the next 24 hours. I plan to work on the game for most of that time. As longas I can survive anyways.

It's the final 24 hours for us to make this game work and show everyone that we can do it. I'm willing to hit it up and work on this for most of those 24 hours. I hope everyone else is on the same page. This is what I'm going to tell them: "If you are satisfied with how the game is and are willing to stand by it and say that you did all the work you had to do, then go to sleep." ... watch them all leave me alone :-p

# posted by siz @ 10:32 AM 0 comments

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!

# posted by siz @ 7:48 PM 0 comments

Yea it's late, but I like doing this kind of stuff. I have been working on a lot of visual things for the game. I don't want to talk about everything too much, but basically, I'm taking advantage of GameX's functtions that enable me to create fadeouts and oscillating transparency. Very nice effects.

So all in all, a lot of things got done today. Much more stuff is getting done tomorrow. And monday... wow. I think I'm going to skip most of my classes and spend 20+ hours at csug.

I guess now the question is, to shower or not?

# posted by siz @ 4:58 AM 0 comments