This year I am Vice President of the programming team (it sort of fell on me, like a tree falls on a parked car during a hurricane). I am also the President of the new Upsilon Pi Epsilon chapter on campus (we're Alpha Beta Sigma). I will also have some sort of advisory capacity to the campus ACM chapter, since I was president last year and this year's president will probably need a lot of help.
I'm working on Sundays, stocking bread on shelves in the Harrisburg/Camp Hill area. I'm going to be trying to sell some websites, don't know how well that will go, need to bang out some templates. The problem is, web design is usually packaged along with some sort of hosting plan, and I don't have any hosting capability.
Work will continue on Showdown IRC. I also intend to start a new project, similar to Showdown but themed around snipers, with movement. I also intend to limit the use of the IRC server. With Showdown, it's a stand-alone IRC Client with an embeded game. With this sniper game, I intend to make it less obvious it is an actual IRC client and seem more like it's a regular game server.
The idea is to not allow the user to select the IRC server (or perhaps severly limit this option) and not allow the user to join any channel they choose. With Showdown, the game client user and regular IRC client users can interact freely, which spreads users of the game client too thin -- they can't find each other. By removing the selection of server and channel, I force all of the users into one location (and since there are very few users for such an indie game, this is a good way to ensure they all come tomether). This channel should be password protected, and the password automatically relayed by the game client (a manner of authenticating to the channel that the joining user is actually using the game client, leaving regular chatters outside).
From there, users will create "rooms" which are tertiary channels, password protected in the same way as the lobby channel. In this way I can ensure more rigid control over >2 users joing a game.
I'll write a lobby-bot that will not appear in the user list, and will respond to automatic queries about room status'.
Basically, the idea is again to use the preexisting IRC server as the game server. However, this time it is meant to be more transparent to the user, making it appear more like a traditional game server. I guess it's similar to MSN's gaming zone lobby system, just I don't actually own the servers.
This will be an excellent way for me to learn C# and Managed DirectX. I'm obviously fully capable of the design necessary for the game, as I was able to create Showdown on my own. Now it's just a matter of learning the syntactical and library differences between Java and C#.
Oh, did I mention I'm also taking 6 classes?
