We’ve reached a rather important crossroads as a team this week, one which will hopefully mean that our stuff gets to you a lot quicker and more efficiently.
The major decision taken was that Project Blast! will be re-coded and re-factored so that we as a team can work on it collaboratively. My work to date is going to be taken as the prototype which essentially means that we know the game works, we understand its mechanics and how its going to look, and basically what we now need to do is get the “objects” coded in such a way that:
a) the program runs efficiently on pretty much all PCs
b) we can all contribute to the development
c) the actual game is much more easily expandable
d) it will make the game more portable to other platforms (such as 360/PS3/Wii)
I’m mindful that this is a big step to take, and the decision wasn’t made easily, but being totally realistic about it this will prove to be the right decision to make at this stage. When I am reading through the code I spot various bits and pieces which are duplicated without need, things that can be done much more efficiently and some things that are just plain wrong! More on this over the coming weeks.
In terms of my own learning/research, I’ve been working on nailing my understanding of classes, their operation and how they integrate within a game loop. I think that I’m just about there with that now – I still have a few areas to work on but certainly things are becoming much clearer in my mind. I’ve been coding a simple little shoot ‘em up using the assets we already have from Project Blast! It’s getting me in the mindset of techniques using classes within game loops. I’m hoping I can make this available for download soon and offer up some high score based challenges with it, on that note I’m really hopeful that we will have stuff to release/show very soon indeed. Its all well and good me talking about these things, but the proof (as they say) is in the pudding. I think the next stage is to capture some footage of Blast! in action to get some actual feedback on the look/style before we progress with the re-coding.
Other stuff now, and Project 2 continues apace. I’m just about ready to announce details on this –hopefully in next weeks diary once I’ve sorted a few other bits and pieces with the team and they are happy for me to start talking about it a little more openly! Id really like to share some screenshots with you so you get the feel for what its all about, so I guess we will need to work on the assets some over the coming days (although we do have some very basic art stuff for prototyping purposes which I’m sure would suffice at this stage).
There’s also quite a bit of other “non development” stuff to think about at the moment, a particular focus is our website and forums. Its particularly hard work to keep these things constant, and fresh and whilst the automatic Twitter update is nice (when @Adarakion remembers to tweet stuff of course) , the forums require constant update to keep them fresh. I guess when we actually have games to talk about and discuss with players, the forums will look after themselves a little more in terms of content and the like. There’s so much to think about/focus on at the moment – I could use a PA!
Real life workloads (and illnesses) has meant that progress hasn’t been quite as fast or swift as I’m sure everyone would have liked over the past few weeks, but these things can’t be helped. Personally I also struggle with motivation some days as I often don’t get home from work till 6pm, spend some time with my little lad (usually involving playing Lego Batman or some such) – have some tea, then I REALLY don’t feel like doing much! I need to break this cycle to move things forward, the question is really how I go about it, do I schedule my time effectively and try and stick to it or am I better playing it by ear and working when I feel the motivation? Knowing how I tend to operate it’s got to be the former rather than the latter, so I best create a timetable and plan my work/learning/team stuff around my real life obligations.
If you feel like starting a discussion or generally commenting on stuff then check out our forums at www.adarakion.co.uk – sign up and post away.