Week 3
Hey!
Week 3 has been an interesting and troubled week for us with some random elements we didn't really plan for - still we ended up dealing with them. We've made some headway on a few segments of the game. Some of the progress came with clear visual evidence, which Mark was happily leaking on twitter and facebook during the week, so if you're following us there, you're already aware of what our main focus has been. And if you are not... well, why on earth wouldn't you do that?
So here we are:
Game Client
The level of detail has changed quite a bit during the time we've been working on this
- Sándor and I spent some time finalizing the graphical and logical structure of the Coat of Arms, as we quickly agreed that our Proof-of-Concept version was lacking some ... beauty. We've had a few iterations until we were both happy with the result, but it's done now and it looks cool, so Sándor is already creating the initial graphical package for this feature so I can finalize this structure in our code. Our Coat of Arms will be quite detailed, though will focus on the Shield itself and not the whole Achievement. Also, we're adding some extra spice to it's overall look by adding things like physical attributes of the concrete shield, like the material(s) it is created from, or the battle scars it has collected through the years while protecting it's wielder.
- I've also started working on the CoA Creator scene, ie. with what kind of UI tools players will be able to actually create their Coat of Arms.
- I've added some additional code for Scene Management now that we have multiple scenes (the CoA and the Game Map) to work with. I originally planned to do this later, but it seemed cleaner to put it in while I'm working on the CoA scene.
- I've once again refactored and further polished a code block, this time, I came up with an idea for tweaking our framework's feature set for scene based Sprite Atlas caching support. This great idea was sparked when I was creating the final CoA structure and wanted to accomplish it quickly, so I could return to the CoA scene the same day. So to teach myself a lesson - again - I spent almost two days on this, until I realized I was a litlle hasty jumping into it, trying to force a more generic solution to it than it should normally be, which made it counter-intuitive and overly complex. So with a grim face, I ended up undoing a few hours work, took the time to think it through, and went with a more-desired approach. The story ended up well, though, thanks to the (corrected) tweak, the feature is now slightly faster, more flexible, and a lot more robust to use. The moral? You can spare hours of thinking by days of hard work. #sarcasm.
CoA Creator Scene, with the main customization options to the left (and some available shapes to the right). Texts are dummy.
Platform & Game Server
- Steve (from Instait) continued to work on the Player Module. This week, his focus has been on some deeper things, like the management of game sessions and the underlying Permission system. Unfortunately, he had to take a day off, so we've made slightly less progress that we were counting with, but this is still a solid improvement on the platform functionality.
- We've also discussed how the Coat of Arms would be tied to players, and how the server and the clients should be handling it (like caching done works, allowing later edits, etc).
Site
- Unfortunately, it seems whenever we think we're past the legacy issues, something new is uncovered that requires an urgent investigation and some hot-fixes. Once again, I've spent way more time on the site's inherited codebase that I wanted, and there are even a few new to-do items on my list about the site, but on a lower priority.
Plans for next week
Priorities didn't change much since Week 2.
- On the client side, the highest priority is still the Coat of Arms Creator. Sándor wants to finish, or being close to finishing the inital assets for the CoA feature and I want to finish, or be close to finish using all of them.
- On server side, it's the Player Module taking priority as the basement for everything else to come. If Steve could finish permissions and basic feature set, he can move either towards Site integration or CoA support (both should be done, only their order is the question).
That's for now. See you in a week!