Working towards the finish
Posted on February 5, 2007
| Sascha
In terms of coding I’m nowadays spending most of the time working on the smaller things within the game that maybe many players won’t notice, but will have a big impact on the final polish of the game.. Things like additional messages and hint when e.g. a nation is terminated and other important ingame events, tweaking the game’s usability (as I wrote in my initial game design I want to have all of the game’s functionality to be accessible with at most 2 clicks) and more newsmessages.
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More content and a VFS
Posted on January 30, 2007
| Sascha
Once again the past days have been very productive when it comes to Project “W” (although I’ve been a bit distracted by the recent Dawn of War Addon) both in terms of content for the game and in terms of coding.
As for the content, I modeled some new buildings so that I currently have 26 of the ~32 buildings finished. I’ve put my priority on creating models for the buildings you can construct right after the start of the game, so the remaining models I have to do will be for some of the more futuristic buildings that you can only build after researching certain technologies.
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Smaller Steps
Posted on January 24, 2007
| Sascha
As usual when a project has advanced a lot, like Project “W” did, the steps you make get smaller and smaller. At first you implement the big features and see big changes within a few days of coding but that phase is over for some time now.
And therefore I’m currently working on a lot of the smaller things that make the game more playable/enjoyable, and that includes a lot of small facets of game design.
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Translation
Posted on January 18, 2007
| Sascha
Another long outstanding thing that I was “succesfully” getting around the last months was translation of Project “W”. But this is history, as I sat down the last few days and implemented translation features into the game. At first I wanted to use the ITE of BDS2006, but somehow actually didn’t like it. So I implemented the whole translation stuff myself, and you can directly translate strings in the game’s main editor “WeltEdit”, which then are referenced through unique identifiers within the game.
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More AI, balancing and research tree
Posted on January 15, 2007
| Sascha
Though I didn’t spent too much time on Projekt “W” since the last posting I still got some stuff done.
Firstly I went for the technology tree, which was (very much like the list of buildings) something that I pushed back and back during the whole developement. But since the list of buildings is closely tied to the technologytree I actually had to do this, and many technologies are mainly there to unlock new buildings.
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Work on AI started
Posted on January 10, 2007
| Sascha
You read right, earlier than I expected I started to implement computer controlled enemies (aka “AI”) that’ll control all non-player regions.
But before doing that step I did a lot on the code and made sure all features worked as expected and that there were no bugs left, so I can fully concentrate on the AI without having to fix problems or bugs at the same time. Luckily there wasn’t much to be done on that part, and except for one or two annoyances (e.
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Raging battles
Posted on January 6, 2007
| Sascha
Over the past days I implemented the last missing sub-feature of the military feature : attacking enemy regions. This was something I pushed back and forth all the time, cause before implementing it I had to be sure that the values and properties of military units would be final, and recently I made a third draft of what properties those units should have and how they would affect combat. The first draft (back in 2003) was too detailed with a lot of different units, which would have been to hard to balance.
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Last posting of this year
Posted on December 30, 2006
| Sascha
I guess this will be the last post on my blog in 2006, and I don’t want to let you switch into 2007 without a last update on the status of Projekt “W”.
Again I worked a lot on the code itself, made several changes to make my life as a coder easier (e.g. a global window update, so I don’t have to care about what windows to update on what action) and most important I decided to get rid of the pixelbuffers for offscreen-rendering.
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Next feature almost done
Posted on December 26, 2006
| Sascha
Short after finishing the research feature I decided to put my fingers on the espionage part of the game. In the very first drafts this was to be only a minor feature, but I promoted it to a main feature (inlcuding it’s own button in the control center) as it adds an interesting twist to the game. It not only allows you to find weak points of your enemies, it’ll also allow you to sabotage your enemies region and division to e.
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Research feature finished and much coding
Posted on December 22, 2006
| Sascha
Contrary to the last few weeks I spent most of my time last days with coding on the game, rather than making content or game design :
The research feature I showed off in the last posting is now finished and you can already research your way through the (right now very small) technology tree and stuff like new buildings and technologies are unlocked along the way of your research. There is now also a nice preview image for eacht technology, though I initially wanted to also include a 3D view (like with buildings and units) I decided for just an image that I’ll prerender.
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