First of all, now we’re at the halfway point of the competition, my game has a name. I’ve opted for RAM – something short and to the points. Easy to remember, and you could play around with words based on the acronym. As computer people will know, RAM is an acronym for Random Access Memory – or Rabid Ageing Marshmallows – if you feel like it. I won’t judge you.

So, what started out as 36 cards actually ended up being 48 to-date. I don’t think I’ll put in any more now as I’ve already had some feedback and the images for backgrounds and cards on each one has taken a big chunk of the development time already. As it is I’m also now considering using a scaling system on just the larger images to use on the cards instead of the smaller images because I’m still not happy with them.

As detailed previously, the data setup and loading code is complete – in so much as not adding any more cards. I may have to edit some of the stats once the cards are playing against each other for balancing, but I am currently working on how the cards will look at present, so that’s once the shell game works. The cards and backgrounds looked terrible on first attempt and I’ve changed it so there are gradient effects as the background of the fronts now where the player can choose their own preference as a starting point to improve on this. The game is all about these cards so they have to look ok, even if it does take a bit more time than I would like to get it right. If I have to draw a line to get on with the game then I will need to go back to these before anything else when it’s time to polish up the game a bit.

Of the game menu options I’ve only got the gallery running at present, mainly because the large computers is the only part that’s properly done. The game doesn’t even have a menu at present so just uses the gallery on the title screen for now.

I’ve commissioned an artist to draw the super computer that will be built up in freeplay mode so hopefully will have those graphics by the 14th of June, so I have time to build it into the game. Not sure how this part of the game will work but it will be something like the total points stat turned into currency over 30 rounds of a game.

I’ll try and keep this blog updated weekly for the last four weeks of this games development.

Categorised as: Competition | Development | Game Studio 2 | RAM | Syntax Bomb