The Chosen

After months of coding and design, the game is finally taking shape as I can now handle units on the screen. I put several finishing touches on the selection system and the scroll system to prep the RTS for another build. Also I have recently added numerous new script variables to a root script file that allows my other developers and I to very easily tweak the code before it runs. I added script variables for screen size, tile size, an array of GUI/mouse interaction variables, nearly all variables involved in the scroll system, and even variables to set preferred frame rates in the graphics engine. I am still amazed at just how helpful these script variables can be, and how they make the designing of the game much more simple and enjoyable.

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Having noticed the many tasks that I still needed to implement, I quickly established a short term game plan for getting through these next set of obstacles. I knew that map map creation would need to be done at some point, and I also knew that it would help stimulate my artist to start cranking out some useful tiles. Hoping this would be a relatively simple process, I came up with a list of necessary variables for each tile, and started by creating a small script file that could be read into the game using a small scripting engine I wrote a while back. This is the same scripting engine I use to save and load game variables and the picture file. Using this very small script file, I talked my designer into creating a map without the aid of a fancy designer, making all changes to the raw data. While he came up with a small map, I created a Tile class and wrote a function to read in the tile data out of the newly created map file. The file loaded in beautifully, allowing me to see the tiles that he had arranged. After a few preliminary modifications to the Tile class that will later help with the path finding, I added a few script variables to the game file to auto load the default map file and called this task completed.

After completing the scroll engine, and implementing a working pause system, I found myself at a decent stopping point to take a break and collect my thoughts. However, I found that I was very pleased with the progress so far, and after a brief break, I jumped back in by working up a list of tasks, that still need to be done. I knew that there was still a lot to do, but apparently it may still be a while before official version 1 is released. I knew that eventually I would have to to do some serious optimizations to the graphics engine, but decided to put that off for a while longer to see how long I could live with the simple version. The actual task list proved to be more that even I remembered. (more…)