Buildings
Posted on September 8, 2006
| Sascha
Yesterday I took the next step on the stairway to finishing my current game. As you could see from the last postings, I implemented the army feature first, and now I also implemented buildings. And after starting on implementing the feature yesterday night I did a “runthrough” and implemented the whole feature, not step-by-step as with the army feature. So I made my WeldEdit export buildinginformation to XML and ingame you can now build them in a region.
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Update
Posted on September 5, 2006
| Sascha
Sadly there are no screenshots to show off this time. But this is mainly due to the fact that I’ve spent the most time on coding the game mechanics, so on the surface nothing has changed but the game is still on it’s track (actually I’m rather surprised at how fast I advance with all the things I have planned). And besides this due to a personal loss in my family I haven’t had that much time to code since my last update.
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Armies and Units
Posted on September 1, 2006
| Sascha
As I already told at some point, armies will play a great role in my current game, especially since it could get a bit hard trying to take over the world without any armies. So I decided this part to be the first one that I’ll try to get playable before getting to the other parts. After having my WeltEdit so far finished that I was able to create the units that’ll be in the final game, I finished the army building window in the game (see the screenshot) and the player is now able to qeue units which will then be build and transfered into a global unit pool (contrary to my first design draft, units will be managed global, not regional anymore), from which the player can assign them to an army later on.
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Ingame Hexfield and more Gamedesign
Posted on August 29, 2006
| Sascha
Coding on the game is fun, doing game design is fun, but coding boring tools to create content isn’t. So I usually switch between those three things on the fly, so that the boring part of creating tools doesn’t overweight the fun of doing the creative stuff for my current project.
And therefore, after coding some hours on “WeltEdit”, the editor to create all content for my current project I went on to implement the three-dimensional hex battlefield into the game, and now have it up and running in it’s own window, nicely implemented into the GUI.
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Some infos about gamedesign
Posted on August 26, 2006
| Sascha
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 :
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Tools and Content
Posted on August 25, 2006
| Sascha
Small note : I now put the abbreviation for the working-title of my current project before postings dealing with it, so you can directly see what the post refers to.
The last days I spent on coding the tool needed for putting content into my current project. I already had some tools from the old prototype, but they were neither finished nor what I really wanted to quickly create content. So I made one single application (although not totally finished yet) where I can create all the content for my game, like region-settings, unit-info and buildings and export (and also import from) to XML.
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Animated skinned UI-control
Posted on August 23, 2006
| Sascha
I already wrote (and posted screenshots) about the skinned controls in the GUI of my current project. And this time you can even see it in motion, as I attached a small video I captured of that control which you can see here (it’s a flash movie, about 500 KBytes big). Due to the fact that swf is not the best format for videos it doesn’t look as good as in “reality”, but you should see that I also added a fade-in and fade-out to the controls, so that the buttons slowly fade in and seem to kind of glow out when you leave their mouse area.
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GUI - Coding and some Hex(es)
Posted on August 20, 2006
| Sascha
After having done the layout for the GUI, I started to implement a new skinned control into the already existing GUI-part of the project. Basically it’s a control consisting of different parts and every part has it’s own texture (overlay, the whole control has it’s own background) and is activated (rendered) as soon as the mouse cursor enters it’s polygonal area. The area itself is specified as a polygon, so you can recreate every complex shape that such a control can have.
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More on the GUI
Posted on August 18, 2006
| Sascha
Did some more work on the GUI and I guess what I’ve got now is going to make it into the final game (the screenshot already comes from within the game). It has the control center with all important buttons (still not named on the screenshot) and also plenty of space for the information the player needs to know about.
And, most important, it (at least in my opionion) perfectly fits the theme of the game.
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Some GUI-Work
Posted on August 17, 2006
| Sascha
I spent some hours doing the basic layout for the control center of the game I already posted about. After doing some drawings (by hand) to get a hang on how it should look, I fired up photoshop and after several hours (and several designs) I came up with the skeleton you can see in the screenshot (click for bigger view) on the left. Right now it misses captions and symbols, so you can’t see what the buttons (the globe in the middle is, maybe as you already guessed, for ending the current round) are done, but that’ll be added.
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