So its been a couple weeks since my last post. I took a week off for some beach days with the better half but when I got back I hit that wall that one man army developers get to when they don't have a solid game design plan. The wall that just screams "Now what?!". I had gotten the basics of the combat system running but until I fleshed out what I wanted the end product to be I wasn't going to be able to work on the story or networking, which is the next 2 big systems to complete. So I spent the last week with some good old fashion paper and pen, some more days at the beach, and just laid out exactly how this sucker is going to be. I also fired up photoshop and started working on replacing some of the placeholder graphics. Here is some of the stuff I came up with. Not too shabby for programmer art but then again there is a bunch of great ps tutorials out there to let you create pretty much anything you could think of. I also did a quick pass over the engine trying out different styles and a failed attempt at a cool looking cockpit HUD.
Next up is the networking system. The goal is to get four players synchronized with each other. Networking is one of those pain in the butt things to code because its takes so long to get it just "right". Lots of tweaks and testing but hopefully I'll be able to reuse a lot of the code I have from another project and get something running in a few days.
While I'm doing this I have to continue fleshing out the story. I have the main idea all set up, it's just sitting down and writing all the dialog, making a list of what assets I'll need, and then figuring out which assets I have time to do myself and which ones I need to commission out. Lots to do in the next few weeks but I'm happy that the aforementioned wall got knocked the $%^& down.
