Progress Report (01/01/2011)

Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2011, everybody!  I hope you're as optimistic and excited about this year as I am.  Won't it be cool to look back at this blog post at the end of the year and see how far this project has come by then?  I'm excited!

Look at all the characters now!  These are just placeholders, of course, but six teams (a total of 16 characters) were successfully created and added to the game world in this test.

Accomplishments:

• Character placement is now working.  More formal testing is necessary, most of the informal tests have worked beautifully so far.
• Minor characters are occasionally being placed far away from their captains, but this is a minor issue and if it doesn't get fixed, it'll be fine.  I considered having that sort of random placement anyway.  I'll address the problem later.  It happens as the result of a brute-force sanity check to fix a problem with characters occupying multiple spawn points.
• AI players are now being created correctly most of the time.  Intermittent bugs are still being worked out.
• Programmed the F5 key to render in a debug mode similar to CornShark's, which provides additional information about the actors on screen.

Known Issues:

• The game setup process takes much too long to create and initialize the AI players.  Gotta optimize that and try to speed it up.
• As complexity grows, server crashes are becoming more frequent, and they leave no report or indication that something went wrong except that server responses stop coming back to the client.  I really need to make the server a lot more robust and verbose.
• 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.  This is only an issue when setting up a game with eight human players.
• 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:

• Beef up the server...again.
• Create the action button menu.
• Investigate ways to dynamically color the team uniforms.  Experiment on the placeholders.
• Create the "whose turn" display.
• Create the character data viewer.

Medium Priority:

• Fix the team color selection for the eighth human player.
• Create the HUD's event log display.
• 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.