More work on the transfer game this afternoon.

I’ve been trying to keep the game handler down to fewer objects so it’s easier to work with all the elements without having to factor in with object calls as it could get kind of messy with all the sub-elements that are going to come into effect in this mini-game. I’ll rely more on scripting for the grunt code stuff such as drawing the game board as it’s easier for Aaron to read my work and understand what’s going on. There will probably be an element of tidying up and improving areas after the grunt work is done because that’s part of the optimisation process, although it’s probably not going to produce any noticeable improvement in the game speed as it’s not exactly hitting the hardware as it is. But one day maybe someone else may read the code so it’s nice to be seen as doing your job properly.

I got the mechanisms in place to have a toggle-able game state in so I could both implement the movement of the player selector for both sides, and also test out some random mapping. I don’t have it in place where the script actually does draw a proper playable game board yet, but it’s got test code in to throw out random tiles so I can check everything is being drawn in place and that my movement works correctly within the tiles on both sides. It’s a little strange working with a tile as the actual player controlled element rather than a sprite, but sometimes it’s cool to mix things up a bit as everything is a learning thing with a new development system.

So, having tidied up various elements of the other parts of the game controller for the transfer system, I’m unable to do anything else until I actually have game boards to work on so I can put in the code to actually start activating individual circuits.

It will be straight in at the deep end for my next blog entry.

As a side note, Aaron and myself have found a project management system we both finally liked, rather than hacking together some kind of shared spreadsheet. We created our project on EasyNote. This is a deliberately simple system of setting tasks and assigning them between people with the usual options to comment, set sub tasks, deadline dates and status of elements. Dead simple to use and invite members into each one so we’ve got all our development notes running from this now.

It appears to be free and has a gig of storage for what looks like both attached files and actual projects, so we should have plenty more space to use it for future projects after Paradroid. As I said, it’s free so this is no advertising plug. I just thought it’s worth a mention as we’re finding it so handy.

Have another screenshot. This one shows the board handler spewing out random tiles just to check the layout is ok. You’ll get one with an actual random generated map one day, I promise !!

Categorised as: Development | Game Studio 2 | Paradroid