The Two Towers

Have you ever seen the NVIDIA logo? It's so shiny, and really shouts it's awesomeness in your face! Well, what's a game without a shiny shouting logo when starting up? Since we're not really using any NVIDIA technology using their logo would be pointless. Yet we really feel like adding such a thing. Why not make a fancy animated Alt-Entertainment logo? Maybe next post you'll get to see it ;)

Some days are better than others, it's generally known. Some days are exceptionally good. Last Monday was such a day. In one day we could scrap more from our todo-list than in an entire week. We have fixed some nasty bugs concerning the chat system, (yes, the chat system is now completely finished) and we managed to get the first bits of the gameplay aspects going. We implemented an RTS scrolling system. (Moving the mouse to the edges of the screen to move the camera around) and that same day tons of sprites were drawn. No wonder that at the end of that day we all agreed that "today was a good day".

As for the rest of the days in the past week, things weren't so good. The entire team suffered from a "Logica Tentamen" (potentially deadly and rare disease), but we all recovered from it when we got our test results back. This did really slow us down though. Luckily for us, the holidays have arrived, and we all have tons of spare time to spend. And also, now that we're actually programming gameplay rather than "behind the scenes" engine components and server stuff, things will be more motivating for all of us.

It was our goal, before the holidays end, to have a basic tower defence. Simple gameplay with only the very essentials of a TD. One type of tower, and one type of enemy. Having this would be a major milestone, since that would mean the entire system is done, and we can start adding more content! But as the holidays progressed, our project didn't really. We got stuck in a wave of things that needed to be done. Our todo-list overflowed and most of the team was primarily busy with holiday stuff (family meetings, for example). We also got a bit of a "punch in the face" when our supervisor told us that other companies have 100+ hours per person, and our average was, at that time, not even half of that.

As you might have noticed there's quite some time between between the last post and this one. Most of this post was written but never published, though the entire team was just assuming it was posted. Little bit of miscommunication there, but no worries! Having a long gap between two posts means there's much to tell! Right now we have even more than the first half of this post claims (see it as a pleasant holidays surprise). We have a system that reads the map data from the files, when the maps are fully loaded the server distributes information about who owns which base (rather important to have that aspect perfectly synchronised, as you may imagine). Then all the spawn points are "linked" to their bases with a home-made path calculation algorithm, of which we are really proud. With all the bases, spawn points and paths distributed we can start on the towers and the enemies.

We had honestly not expected this amount of work. Our ToDo list looked like this: (1) Make paths, (2) Enemy spawning, (3) Tower building. We had planned to do all that in just one week. We failed horribly, we got smacked to the ground and punched in the face. Point one (the paths) turned out to be enough material to fill a week of work, since we completely forgot everything had to be perfectly synchronised. A big setback for all of us. But maybe it was for the best, we wouldn't have learned anything if everything went smooth, now wouldn't we?