The Chosen

Well, the bad news is, this project is not currently my top priority so it may be a while until I get back to working on it full time. The good news is, this project still has a special place in my heart and I still spend quite a bit of time thinking about it. Even though this is not my top priority, I still have found some time to do some minor coding on some of the smaller features.

I have added unit order queuing and some simple code to show those orders so now the units can be moved through multiple waypoints effortlessly. I’ve also added the distinction to separate your units from enemy units, and adjust the cursor icon as necessary. This also includes code to prevent you from moving or mass selecting enemy units. I haven’t incorporated actual teams yet, which will allow for allied units that are not yours to control, but not enemies to attack, but that will be the next addition. I’ve added some minimal code to link the GUI to the action by showing the currently selected units in the bottom left of the screen, giving a count for each unit type and listing every unit. I’ve added code to allow the game to be played at any resolution, and even full screen, but for now the game will remain at a constant windowed size. I’ve added a splash screen. Recently, I’ve added the text display part of the GUI that will inform you of unit completion or base attacks. This has all been added and tested but still needs a little tweaking and I will probably incorporate much of it into the current scripting system, but that’s a task for another day.

All in all, I am bummed out that I can t spend much more time on this, but it does give me something to look foreword to when I finish the other projects I’m currently vested in.

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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Finaly I’m done with the scripting portion of the GUI. Though I’m sure that I will need to modify a thing of two as I start witting other code to interact with the GUI, but still it feels like a big accomplishment. While finishing touches on my script code for the GUI, I was also working on the cursor animation engine which is also up and running beautifully. Sadly, because the cursors are automatically removed from the screen shot, my cool animated cursors don’t appear in the picture, but I assure you they are very cool. In almost no time at all, after minimal explanation, I was able to hand off the script files to my game designer and he was able to construct his own version of the GUI as seen above. He was also able to modify the new cursors file, and using a constant code base, work with multiple new cursors and see how they looked in the real engine. Before I knew it, he had completely redesigned by default test GUI (bellow) into something that looks much yet functions exactly the same.

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Whenever I start a project like this, I also try and identify all of the possible problems, and troublesome issues first. Long before I start writing any code that will end up in the final game, during the first design meetings, I isolate each issue, either mentally or in actual test code environments, and make sure that the design concept is possible, and within grasp. This project was no exception, and I wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing.

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I knew that clickable units would brighten the spirits of my anxious audience, so I made that my next goal. However, as a programmer, I knew that implementing the unit selection system could be much easier if I had a visual representation of which unit(s) were selected. To represent this status I would need a graphic user interface (GUI), which meant that before I could add units, I needed to design and implement a GUI. The actual GUI layout was one of the many details that me and my designer argues over for quite some time. To settle this debate I decided that I would write the GUI using a my scripting engine, which would allow any user to customize the GUI any way that the user would see fit, the better way of course would then just be the default version. During initial talks, this process sounded pretty strait forward, and it it seemed like just a matter of time before it was done. Once I started work on this feature, I soon ran into several issues. (more…)

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…)