http://www.wundermint.com/ The Fresh Express RSS en-us Sat, 26 Jul 2008 19:11:22 GMT http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss CakePHP john@wundermint.com john@wundermint.com http://www.wundermint.com/posts/view/39
This means a number of things. The bad news is that it will be virtually impossible to make my originally intended deadline. The good news, though, is that it will be a better, more cohesive experience. I also now have a solid foundation for a nifty puzzle game further down the line. A bit of scary news: I'm not actually going back to my original combat system either. Instead I'm going to try my hand at a sort of action / RTS fusion thing.

Considering the time spent tinkering with the puzzle stuff and the scope of the new system, I estimate to be an entire month behind. We'll see how the next week or two goes, but the odds of making the August deadline are looking pretty bleak.

This post is screenshot free, given that the project is just now changing gears and I haven't had a chance to bang anything out yet. I'm excited about the new direction and am confident that after the dust settles, this will have all been for the best. I'm going to try to be a bit more open about development now that the end is in sight. Look forward to next week when I reveal how some of this new system works! ]]> Sun, 13 Jul 2008 13:25:26 -0500 GMT http://www.wundermint.com/posts/view/39 http://www.wundermint.com/posts/view/38

An epic class refactor job.

Repairing an infuriating bug in the chain system.

Adding proper bars for the player.

And more! So, I actually got quite a bit done this week. It's just not the forward-momentum productivity stuff I was hoping for. Improvements are improvements, though, and it's looking more and more like a real game with each passing day.

Current state:


The only real visual difference is the presence of those colored bars. Exciting, I know. Looking at a calendar, it seems I have just under four weeks left. This is ample time to finish, provided I don't become too distracted. ]]> Sun, 06 Jul 2008 17:14:08 -0500 GMT http://www.wundermint.com/posts/view/38 http://www.wundermint.com/posts/view/37
And now, since I'm such a swell guy, here's a screen of the (very) rough combat prototype:


I know what you're thinking. "Oh no! Blocks. On a grid. And you probably have to match them!" Well, you'd be right, but this has some quirks that can't be seen in the screenshot. It's not the pinnacle of originality, I'll admit, but accessibility counts for a lot here. In total, it should still feel like its own game, which is enough for me. ]]> Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:26:11 -0500 GMT http://www.wundermint.com/posts/view/37 http://www.wundermint.com/posts/view/36
You see, the as-of-yet undisclosed combat system is in a limbo of sorts. I have my original plan for it clearly mapped out, and am very fond of it. It should be a lot of fun to play and its integration with the rest of the game would be an interesting mix, but that's where its value ends.

So, I've decided to take a stab at creating an alternate combat system. I've got the design for it mostly hammered out already, and I intend to spend the next week putting together a prototype to evaluate it's fun-ness. If this ends in catastrophic failure (which is entirely possible as this is, get ready for it, a puzzle game) I'll probably just scrap it and go back to the old model (which is not a puzzle game). If it succeeds, however, I'll have something more approachable and with a great deal more longevity, which is more fitting with the large scale goals for this game anyway.

So stay tuned for news of the coming tinkerings. I may even publicly release the prototype for feedback. Also, there are no screens this week. Life is hard. ]]> Sun, 22 Jun 2008 18:19:56 -0500 GMT http://www.wundermint.com/posts/view/36 http://www.wundermint.com/posts/view/35
New and Improved Sector:


Brand Spanking New Market:


I'm just going to leave it at that for this week. Next update, things will probably be back to their normal, long-winded, screenshotless state. ]]> Sun, 15 Jun 2008 14:18:37 -0500 GMT http://www.wundermint.com/posts/view/35 http://www.wundermint.com/posts/view/34 McGrue, Kildorf, and SDHawk.

A fair amount of work went into this week's update, though it really only comes down to two improvements. A large part is some handy changes to my object management / tracking stuff for debug purposes. Not particularly exciting, but helpful. The other portion is thanks to that swell guy Overkill, who went to the trouble of adding the keybuffer stuff to the lua binding, which instantly made the game feel more complete. Well, once I got past some weird kinks and quirks with both it and v3's printstring it did.

So this is pretty light and not especially exciting, but I am back on course. Look forward to a tasty update next week. ]]> Sun, 08 Jun 2008 09:45:43 -0500 GMT http://www.wundermint.com/posts/view/34 http://www.wundermint.com/posts/view/33
The industry/technology system has been redesigned. Again. This time around I'm feeling that this is going to be the one that makes it to release. It's a nice balance of simplicity and sophistication. What's even better is that it's no longer directly tied to the "active" component of the game. This means I can breathe easily while tinkering with getting it just right instead of constantly making large/hacky changes to the tech system to keep everything in sync. Sadly, all of this is just in notebooks and text files right now, so I haven't got anything to show.

Wait. Did I just say "active" component? What could that possibly mean? Am I just making up this stuff up to make my game sound more awesome? Or is there something to it? Don't touch that dial! ]]> Fri, 23 May 2008 11:14:57 -0500 GMT http://www.wundermint.com/posts/view/33 http://www.wundermint.com/posts/view/32
The Client:

I spent the first part of my week absolutely tearing up the client. I rewrote giant heaps of stuff for the purpose of saner organization. Of particular note (from the would-be players' perspective), the entire "galactic heirarchy" was rewritten. It's now more "realistic", which I originally had mixed feelings about, but now that it's in place, I'm actually quite satisfied with it.



So, some UI components have been shuffled around, and it's a lot more colorful now. There's still quite a distance to go, but it's starting to really take shape visually, which always feels rewarding.

The Server:

This was definitely the most frustrating task, in spite of it not being all that complicated or challenging. You see, I went to the trouble of writing out a very specific client design, so that I wasn't just fumbling around until I ended up at the finish line. I did the same with my network protocol. For some reason, though, I completely failed to think through the design for the server and, as a result, it was a treacherous, unwieldy force-to-be-reckoned-with. So, I went in and chopped it to pieces, saving a few useful fragments. Then I pieced it all back together (this time with a cohesive vision in mind). The result? It does exactly what it did before. The important difference is that it is significantly easier to maintain.

If this game were to become wildly popular, I'd probably have to rewrite the server for efficiency, but as it stands now, it's reasonably swift and super easy to manage. ]]> Fri, 16 May 2008 13:25:31 -0500 GMT http://www.wundermint.com/posts/view/32 http://www.wundermint.com/posts/view/31 meaningful interactions. I am happy to report that this all went quite smoothly and that things are really starting to fall into place. Most of the foundational stuff is in and working without a hitch, so now it's really just a matter of expanding it into an actual game. No small feat, sure, but the "hard" part is out of the way now.

So, while there isn't much of a game, and the action set is pretty limited, it's fair to say that things are going swimmingly! However, all is not sunshine and rainbows. There is a dark, sinister truth yet to be told. There are two gigantic, glaring, and completely-unforgivable flaws with VERGE that are crippling my development efforts. First is that that jerk Kildorf managed to break line drawing by causing it to disinclude an entire pixel occasionally. Second is that, somehow, the keybuffer stuff has yet to be properly bound to Lua, leaving all of my text inputting capabilities in the lurch. Okay, so these aren't really stopping me from getting anything done, but I will be very happy when they're remedied.

There are no screens this week on account of there's nothing new to show. Since all the changes are to the background behavior, nothing actually looks any different. I could just post an old screen and call it a new one if I really wanted; it'd be accurate, but silly. Over the coming week, I'll be putting in more mechanics, so there should actually be some screens next time. ]]> Fri, 09 May 2008 14:18:09 -0500 GMT http://www.wundermint.com/posts/view/31 http://www.wundermint.com/posts/view/30 do anything useful just yet, it is in place, and the client and server play nicely with each other, which is quite satisfying.

With that out of the way, I took to the burdensome task of writing out the network protocol specification. This is quite boring and requires lots of me sketching and scribbling on paper. I think it's safe to say that the core principles are quite solid. Documenting all the different exchanges is going to take a bit more work, but the end result will be a super-handy reference manual that will make the actual implementation significantly easier.

So, where are the pictures? Well, I wasn't originally planning on doing so much network (read: not screenshot worthy) stuff, so.. here:



Just so that there is something to look at. The important thing to notice is that clump of blue in the upper left corner. That's the network activity indicator. Its purpose is shrouded in mystery, or perhaps it just indicates network activity.

And that wraps up this week's report. Tune in next time for Adventures in Getting the Client and Server to Actually do What I Want. ]]> Fri, 02 May 2008 10:32:35 -0500 GMT http://www.wundermint.com/posts/view/30