Progress Report (12/18/2010)

It feels so good to have the actual gameplay elements underway!  The first interactive HUD elements are in place and functional, and the spawn point markers are being successfully processed.

This one screen shot shows evidence of all of this week's progress.  The team status display is shown, it shows an AI team that has successfully recruited an officer, and the spawn point markers have been removed and processed automatically by the game server!

Accomplishments:

• The AI players now spend their coins.  They go shopping to buy upgrades and recruit characters, and the server logs it all.  You can see some evidence of this in the screen shot above, in the team status viewer.
• Speaking of the team status display, it's completely functional now.  Look on the screen shot above.  The arrow buttons scroll through the teams in the game, listing their characters and showing their health levels.  Can you guess what the little "X" button in the corner does?
• The process of implementing this display element exposed some minor bugs, but those issues have all been resolved. 
• The HUD button menu has been started, but so far it only contains buttons for toggling the team status viewer and the in-game options menu.
• Speaking of the in-game options screen, it's done and it works.  It contains options for toggling the audio and exiting the program.
• The spawn point functionality is working.  Notice in the screen shot above that the spawn point markers are no longer visible.  They have been filtered out of the game map and added to a list that the server will use when placing the characters on the board.

Known Issues:

• The server sometimes stops working before creating all of the AI players.  This seems to happen only when five or more AI players are selected.
• Network latency causes character upgrades to not show up right away.  The client needs to wait for the updated character to return from the server before returning to the team screen.
• The color cycle control on the team creation screen throws an exception when there is only one color remaining to choose from.
• Chat messages get lost when a user in multiplayer mode switches between the lobby and the team/character configuration screens.
• When a player drops off, their team data is orphaned.  The server needs to recognize this and place the orphaned team under AI control.

Next Steps:

High Priority:

• Create some stand-in placeholder graphics for the game characters until the artists can give me the real ones.
• Investigate ways to dynamically color the team uniforms.  Experiment on the placeholders.
• Create the "whose turn" display.
• Create the character data viewer.
• Fix the team color selection for the eighth human player.

Medium Priority:

• Create the event log.
• Create the action button menu.
• Address the server errors during AI creation.
• Finish voice scripts for narration.
• Finish asset lists for current set of level designs.
• Formalize the flowchart for the AI logic.

Low Priority:

• Create the token factory and displays.
• Finish the team creation screen.
• Put in the floor image for the captains to stand on.
• Replace plain gray buttons with captain character images.
• Create command line interface for server so it can be launched and configured remotely.
• Finish the level design guide.
• Design the TLC web site.
• Get coin display graphics from the art team.
• Add it to the team configuration screen.the character configuration screen and the recruitment screen.