Yesterday was my one year anniversary of working on Ancient Galaxy full time. It has been a crazy year, with a divorce, my sister's death, and the difficulty of assembling and maintaining a team working on the project.

Overall, though, it has been probably the best year of my life so far. I have been able to keep in shape by playing a lot of hoops, have a fairly good social life, and still work like crazy on the game.

As I look at the first journal post last year, the game has come a long, long way. If I look at the shots from a couple of months ago, they look very similar to now. Most of the improvements have been things that are only apparent from playing the game. This tells me it's time to go into the final push and get this thing shipped.


Yesterday I refactored some of the particle code, and had an interesting bug while at it.

Somehow I screwed up the bullet firing code so that the time between shots property was not being respected. This made the hand cannon, which is a weapon that normally can be fired ~ every 1.5 seconds into a lethal minigun. Here is a shot of a cultist blasting the crap out of me before I fixed it :



I also added hint triggers, so that if the player has a textual introduction to the game objects over time as he encounters them, like the scannable symbols, and the new healer device. We don't have an interface for selecting inventory objects yet, only weapons, so I made the healing work via a heptagonal object that you stand on in order to activate ( similar to the teleporters ).

I'm going to put back in the vertical auto-aim today - one play tester was having a hell of a time getting stuck shooting into the dirt. It will be able to be shut off, but I think it will be on by default.

Also, I'm adding force fields, and finally putting in the nav code to understand locked doors, and areas blocked via force-fields.