Today I didn't get much done, as I was out of town for most of the day, but Mark was hard at work drawing up about 16 different trees and shrubs(plus their 'damaged' textures) to populate the landscape of Angels 22. After I got back to my house, I updated the "FoliageDatabase" to include the new items, and then fired up the Angels 22 Level Editor(R), or ALE(hurray for acronyms[grin]), and made a quick little demo of all his flora making up a scattered forest. Also "hidden" in this demo are a few sprites that I made myself, can you guess which ones they are?
The Angels 22 List of Difficulties
The following list contains the programming challenges that I feel will be the most difficult to overcome, so read on and see how little I actually know about game programming....
Scripting
In order to have A22 work the way we are envisioning it (a sidescrolling Ace Combat essentially), we are going to require some sort of scripting. We aren't planning on anything super fancy, just spawning enemies after certain criteria are met, playing a certain sound(ie. radio chatter), etc. Because we don't need that elaborate of a system, I think I'm going to roll my own solution, which I have never done before, so we'll see how that turns out....
AI
The AI in A22 is going to have to be more complex than anything I've ever done. We are planning on having a wingman fly with you on most missions, which you can give simple instructions to, such as "Attack My Target" or "Form On Me". This is going to require some serious thinking on my part, as I have never done something on that scale before. Add to that the AI for enemy planes, tanks, missiles, and the bosses, and it looks like I've got a long road ahead of me.
Well, thats all the difficult stuff I can think of at this moment, everything else I have essentially done before, so it shouldn't be much of a problem. Anyways, thanks for reading this far, and let us know what you think of the project so far. Peace Out!