Today I did mostly polish on the game. First I worked on giving some visual feedback to the player about where he can or not fly the ship: Then I added code to build “asteroid planets”, much more irregular… It was a bit hard reaching the balance of “don’t want to code this whole thing […]
I spent most of my time today creating a page on Playfield, a site that generates pages for indie games. It’s still in beta, but it already looks very cool, and for us that dislike any kind of web programming and rather spend time working on the game than on the marketing (although I recognize […]
I’ve been a bit demotivated in the last few days… No reason in particular, think I’m just tired from the DayJob™, but because of that I haven’t been very productive… Today I only managed to make the planets spherical when we’re in orbit, which should have taken me 10 minutes, and it took me over […]
The results weren’t as good as I hoped, but at least they’re fully procedural and there’s not many idiot names in the lists… I tried using a syllable-based system, but there are just too many of those, so the memory required for this algorithm would be just too much! Ended up using a list of […]
Still working on the random name generation, not 100% happy with the results… So far, the system with best quality is based on probability. I give the system a list of “good names”, and he builds a dictionary of probabilities, which describe the probability of character Z to come after character Y, after character X. […]
But Tuesday’s are also terrible! DayJob™ takes a lot of my time on the beginning of the week, so I get dead tired and can’t produce much on Gateway as I’d wish… Today I spent most of my time doing research on how to generate procedural names for the planets. Currently I’m using a list […]
The “escort” mission was full of them, some due to the multithreading, others due the actual logic of the system (for example, the player could leave without the person being escorted)… Other than that, it was just standard debugging… Still found some places where I’m using the old brains, instead of the script-based AIs, so […]
Not much to talk about today (at least nothing interesting)… It was mainly a bug-tracking/killing day… Some issues with the management of missions (which would sometimes cause for duplicate missions to show up), plus the sneaky ninja that wouldn’t cross the area boundary (which sucks!) and some other small stuff… I expect tomorrow I’ll be […]
Found another bug with the game related to the new multithreading system: sometimes, at a certain point in the game, ninjas spawn to chase the player. Before, when the player changed area, the ninja would spawn again, but now they don’t, because they haven’t been destroyed (the previous area is still in RAM). I’ve adjusted […]
Scheduling and task management is something I could never do just right, I always tend to underestimate the effort, even if I multiply the times by two or even three… I probably think I’m smarter than I actually am! Anyway, today was one of those tasks… I thought that reviewing the scanner effect would take […]