Progress Report (01/29/2011)

Jammy Life from GGJ2011

If I may digress a bit, this was a historic week in my personal life because I participated in my very first game jam.  Not only was it my first, but it was the largest game jam in history (up to this point):  The 2011 Global Game Jam!  I worked with a good friend of mine, Ross Story, and in under 24 hours of total work time, we created a fun little artificial life simulation game that we named Jammy Life, in which the player tries to create a sustainable environment for our little creatures to live and thrive.  We called the creatures "jammies" -- a reference to their origins at the game jam.

Now back to our regularly scheduled progress report on Team Laser Combat.  I took a nice step forward this week, which surprises the heck out of me because I didn't spend that much time on this project.  I know better than to look a gift horse in the mouth though.

The character data viewer in the upper right corner looks pretty good and works pretty well.  I'm just not sure that it works in the most ergonomic way that it can.

Accomplishments:

• Finally fixed all of the AI initialization issues!  Yes, ALL of them (as far as I know)!
• Created the character data viewer.  It shows the stats for one character at a time, and centers the main viewport on the selected character.  (See the screen shot above.)
• I'm going to let some people use this feature and get some feedback, because I'm not entirely sure that I want this control to center the view on the character.  The original plan was to have buttons on the Actions menu for this purpose.  Now I'm thinking of connecting the two elements.
• Worked on more level designs and concept sketches.
• Did a thorough test of Single Player mode.  Everything works great up to this point.
• Did a thorough test of Host LAN mode.  It mostly worked, except for cases where another human player in Join LAN mode caused errors to appear on the server.
• Did a thorough test of Join LAN mode.  It's broken.  There seems to be some sort of data-related issue that keeps character data from being properly accessed.

Known Issues:

• Join LAN mode causes some sort of server error that gives the client an inconsistent data set.
• 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:

• Create the action button menu.
• Investigate ways to dynamically color the team uniforms.  Experiment on the placeholders.
• Create the "whose turn" display.

Medium Priority:

• Implement the Move action.
• 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.
• Implement the Draw Token action.
• Implement the Heal action.
• Implement the Attack action.
• Finish the team creation screen.
• Put in the floor image for the captains to stand on.
• Replace plain gray buttons with captain character images.
• 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.

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