Progress Report (12/25/2010)

Merry Christmas!

With the big holiday, there wasn't a whole lot of time for Team Laser Combat.  My only goal for the week was to get the characters on screen, and I was only marginally successful.  First, the characters were about ten pixels too tall, which I already fixed.  But the biggest issue is that only some of the characters show up, and only some of the time.

Look!  Characters!  Too bad that was only half of the characters in the game...plus they're a bit large for the scale.

Accomplishments:

• Placeholder images for the characters are now appearing on screen!  Well...sometimes.  Most of the characters are not showing up, despite the fact that they are being initialized with correct spawn points. Fixing this is obviously critical and currently my primary source of stress.
• Added keyboard controls so now we can scroll around the map to see the entire game board.

Known Issues:

• Character graphics do not always appear on the game board.  The server assigns valid spawn points to them, the client receives them, but for some reason they don't always show up on screen.
• The server sometimes stops working before creating all of the AI players.
• 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:

• Get the characters to show up on the game screen!  All of them, every time!  (Grr...)
• 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.