Since relaunching my page with WordPress back in march 2007, there have been over 100,000 visitors to my page. Although this does not sound much at first, I guess it’s pretty good for a personal page (together with the fact that there were roughly 75,000 visitors to my page before that relaunch) and I hope that all those visitors enjoyed my projects, demos, applications and tutorials. And for those interested in numbers, I just saw that the traffic generated by my page for the first five months of 2008 (including views and downloads) has topped 1.5 terabytes, with most of the traffic coming form downloads generated by my games. In my eyes this is a nice summary, and I hop that it’ll continue like that!

And now back to my current work, “Phase 2″ for Projekt “W”, this time with some stuff from behind the scenes (aka the code, mostly this will only be interesting for programmers) :
You may remember the battle selection screen I’ve been showing off that’ll allow you to select if you want to battle it out yourself (on the hex-based battlefield) or if you want to have it simulated. One not-so-easy part in terms of coding was to implement this for when the AI attacks a human region. The AI itself is placed in it’s own unit (ProjektWeltherrscher_AI.pas) and has several procedures and functions for doing construction, army management and so on.
As with most AIs out there, the one in Projekt “W” is using a lot of loops (and is basically a finite state-machine) and within one of those loops it attacks enemy nations. In “Phase 1″ there was no problem as it would only have to simulate the battle and output a message to the player’s message log. But in “Phase 2″ the player should be able to choose whether to fight manually or to simulate the battle, even if he is attacked by the AI (and not only when the player himself is attacking a region), which meant that I somehow had to add a way for the AI to change to the battle selection screen without breaking out of the AI’s loop.
But this AI class is now used by the game’s main class (located in ProjektWeltherrscher_Global.pas), which means I can’t access the game’s class from the AI’s unit (this would be a circular reference, something not allowed within Pascal/Delphi), but I didn’t want to sacrifice my clean project structure by just moving the whole AI class into that unit in order to be able to access the game’s class from the AI.
So after a lot of thoughts on how to deal with this, I decided to go for a simple callback function. Most programmers should know what a callback is, it’s a function that is declared like a variable which can be assigned. So now the AI class has a callback that is assigned from the game’s class (remember, the game class can assign the AI class, but not otherwise) and that get’s called whenever the AI attacks a human-controlled region. That function now switches to the battle selection screen, waits for the player’s choice and then opts out to give control back to the AI loop. It’s easily implemented, but not often very obvious and a lot of programmers get headaches on how to solve such circular references, so hopefully this will help one or two of you guys out there!

As you may have guessed from the complete new layout and design I redid my homepage (again, this is the sixth iteration since I went only 4 years or so ago). My old web-package only included 200 MBytes of webspace and that hasn’t been really enough to hold all my projects which forced me to delete old things when uploading new stuff. And therefore I decided to upgrade to the next bigger web-package with 1 GByte of webspace but this one also includes MySQL (5 databases) as well as PHP.

So I also decided to get rid of a static HTML website and move on to a dynamic page that’ll allow people to comment on my stuff like projects and will make updating and adding content easier. To help my with that the page is now running WordPress (which is a great thing and I therefore want to thank it’s authors), and I’m using it not only for blogging but also as a CMS to e.g. organize downloads. So that also means that I won’t update my old blog anymore but instead blog on my own page from now on (and news on Project “W” will be coming within the next days).

But converting all the old static content over is a lot of work (and there is a lot of content on my pages) so there is still a lot missing here. Therefore if you need some of the content of the old page you can’t find here, please visit the old page over here. It’ll remain online until I moved over all content.

Maybe some of you want to know how I do the design for my games, so I thought to write down something on this.
Note : I’m no game designer and I never worked on commercial titles (though my freeware games and apps are rather successfull), so take the following stuff as my personal view on this matter, don’t cite me on this in a fiery discussion or so.

Most important notice about gamedesign :
>Your PC is the most dangerous enemy of creativity! <
Why you ask? Plain simple : you can do so much stuff with your PC (surf the net, read mails, play games, watch TV, listen to music, and so on) that it’s very easy to get distracted. So it’s (at least for me) often the case that I try to do some gamedesign and then think “ah well, you haven’t read your mails for an hour or so, just quickly do it and then carry on”, and then you also think “now that I’ve read my mails I should take a quick look through some forums” and this goes on and on, and at some point you notice that you have your game design document open for hours, but haven’t written down a single line. And what’s even worse is the fact that due to all the distraction your mind usually won’t be able to spill out great ideas for your game. All my good ideas came out of my mind when I turned away from my PC (just switch the screen off) or was doing something totally unrelated. So maybe if you’re running out of ideas, turn away from the PC and try to relax or do something else, as the ideas then tend to come in by themselves. But don’t forget to write them down later!

The best tool (or call it “application”) for game design :
>Plain Pen-And-Paper<
This goes directly together with the above point. The best tool for doing game-design related stuff (may it be writing down ideas or drawing graphics) is a piece of paper (or a memopad, so that your stuff won’t fly all over the place) and a pen. At least that’s how I did all GUIs for my recent games, and most of the time those designs made it (with small adjustments, on paper I only do rough outlines with descriptions) into the final game, and that is also the case with my current game. Now you could also do all those fancy drawings in applications that were designed for this, like Photoshop or Corel Draw, but you’ll mostly suffer from what I wrote above. If you do those designs on paper it’s like a flowing river, you start drawing and the ideas start to flow through your head, go down your arm and drop onto the paper via your pen (literally, don’t take this too serious ). Something that usually won’t happen when you sit in front of your PC after you have opened up your favorite drawing application.

So much for now, hopefully some of you also see the above things the way as I do!

Well, after a bigger break I’m back at coding again (at least hobby-coding, already did some “serious” coding during the last months) and I have started to work on something new that’s actually rather old :
Back in 2003 I started on a roundbased strategy-game and wrote a rather big design document and also made a working prototype (but with no actual gameplay in it). But soon I realised that the design of this game was too complex (both in terms of gameplay and in terms of content I had to create), so I dropped it.
But some days ago I read through the old design document and decided to stream-line much of the gameplay and content, so that it’s more fun to play and that my chances of finishing it someday are much bigger than with the old concept. But for now I won’t reveal much more, except for this mysterious screenshot (click for some bigger view), maybe some people know at least a tiny bit about this project.

Stay tuned, I’ll have you updated on this. And I also plan (after finishing it) to do a write-up, where I also want to tell a bit about the process of streamlining my first game design to make it more interesting, as this is the first time I did such a thing with an older project of mine that I initially wanted to stop forever.