Saturday, January 18th 2020
Last week I came home from work Friday and made the mistake of thinking I could get a little bit of coding done before posting my blog. I was a foolish silly man. five hours later, I was knee deep in "if" statements and nowhere near done with my weekly blog. As a result I spent Saturday morning writing my blog and creating a new weekly poll. Also, these Strange Brothers went to a funeral mid day on Saturday for our Great Uncle Bob. I did not know him very well but had some brief fond memories of him. I actually learned a little bit about him at the funeral. Life is short folks and we are so very fragile.
Sunday, January 19th 2020
Less work gets done on Sunday as I have evening plans after work. I get a short window in between where I was able to get some design work done. I am continuing the outline for designated structures. Hope is one of the stats in the game that dictates the health of the population living in the population centers. The hope structures all give hope in different quantities with a variety of other positive, negative, and interpretative consequences. Interpretative consequences are a design concept that have results with no clear advantage or disadvantage. These results may end up being positive or negative depending on what the player does with them or they may change nothing significant in the game at all. The delayed effect of consequence allows for each initial decision to have cascading results. The interpretative consequences that have no clear tangible effect will invite the player to place their own selves and imagination into the story and world. The school hope structure shown below has an interpretive result of having an adaptable curriculum. The player will choose to have the school focus more on teaching more theologically, scientifically, or militaristic. The delayed consequences will vary depending on the choice. A result with virtually no visible consequence may be that the population adopts a particular stance on something only effecting their societal culture and not the game play.
Monday, January 20th 2020
Building the procedural generated world is the first step of the game production and I remain on that step. On Monday I bounced between running the generator and filling in holes anywhere they showed up on the tile map. This went on for many hours. I chose a very meticulous method of creating an "if" statement for any potential combination of tiles and rotated angles that show up as the generator cycles over the ground tile map. I know this probably isn't the best way. In fact, today I may have come up with a method using events, actions, and delegates that calls all neighbors of a ground tile anytime it is edited. I will be thinking of how to implement this but will likely stay the path for now. I posted a short video of my code below for anyone who is just curious what the coding interface looks like.
Tuesday, January 21st 2020
Micheal, that other Strange Brother came over to review progress and dig into the hope structure design with me. The list up above is the results of my work Sunday and this effort. He is still without a computer. He may start visiting the library and using their computers or we may use one of our tax returns to buy a chrome book for him. He really just needs some interface to type as his main contributions are all written word.
Wednesday, January 22nd 2020
A day I am not too proud of. I got out of work fairly late and then did my weekly house cleaning. We got a new vacuum that made me feel a little old. Vacuums have come a really long way folks. It runs on a battery and has no bag in it. Anyway, it took a minute to get that all figured out. We also recently adopted an old kitty that now shares the couch with us at night. She doesn't move around much and it has given me a bit of difficulty getting some late night laptop work done. ..... buuuutt... these is all excuses. I will strive to be BETTER!
Thursday, January 23rd 2020
I put another eight hours into making the script work for the world generation at the base ground tile level. I know it feels like this step is taking forever, and that is because it is! This is the foundation for the entire world though. Since it is a procedurally generated game it is very important I get this correct. I am however just building a prototype in the first two month sprint. Once the prototype is completed I will be able to re-evaluate where I should put my time and efforts. Below I posted a quick video of one 40x40 tile world. Eventually, the world will have a splitting river, roads, highways, and enough structures fit for a city. I will also be expanding the size as large as I can get until it breaks.
Week Review:
This last week brought with it many life things that made less for game dev things. I sometimes must remind myself that life things must come first... MUST BE HUMAN... MUST PARTICIPATE IN HUMANITY... that is my internal robot brain voice that sometimes tells me to be human and do human stuff. Easy to forget you know. This upcoming week I am going to strive to get my highways and roads working in the world generation code. I think when infrastructure starts planting in the earth it will start to feel more like a place. I am also planning on doing some more concept art around the designated structures and some of the future design concept ideas that will be fun to discuss. The poll was a bit different this week in that we asked if you liked our game mechanic idea of flying a drone around the battlefield commanding squads and managing the city rather than a traditional hovering over the world mouse rts situation. One poll voter said "I love it". We thank you from the depth of our hearts kind poll voter. If you are reading this now and you wan't to take part in our poll for this week, you can just go to our home page and scroll to the bottom. I even made a little link directly below.
What I did wrong:
There was one day I literally got nothing done and another where I got minimal work done. I need to commit to knocking out at least some task on a daily basis.
What I did right
I stuck to the design method for the tile generation despite wanting to change multiple times. If I can flesh out a much faster idea for the base tile creation and mock up a working alternative in thirty minutes or less than I will consider changing it.
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