School/Work
This next week is the last full week of classes, then theres a week before final exams. But damnitall I've got a linear algebra exam on Monday, so I'm spending most of my weekend going through all the material so I can cross my fingers and hope for the best on Monday. On the work front, I signed/sent the lease for my apartment in Cambridge. My other 4 intern-roommates include 1 other guy from UIUC and 3 from CMU, hopefully it will be a good combo.
Progress
This week was particularly busy, which didn't leave much time for development. This was compounded by a string of bugs with FRB, the engine I'm using. Thankfully the guy who develops it is extremely nice and helpful, and helped me sort out my problems over AIM and sent me bug fixes. Anyhow now all the data in the game is loaded from XML. Basically theres a pre-set directory structure that contains all the data on game assets (ships, weapons, maps, players) and it is all loaded when the game starts, and then referenced when needed. Also I changed up the collision; FRB supports arbitrary bounding shapes, so I reworked things to use this. Unfortunately one of the bugs is that I can't get bounce collision with this method, at least not without some still-to-be-done messing around.
Level Design?
This coming week is the last week of the project (at least for grade purposes) so I want to put out something pretty cool using what I've got so far. I didn't get as far down my feature list as I had hoped, and I won't really have much time to work on it until after my exam Monday. I started making a simple level, bu then I discovered I hadn't really thought through the gameplay very much. I had no idea what kind of objects to put in the game world - or what exactly to have the player do. I modelled the mechanics originally after Cosmic Rift - but that is an online game and it isn't story-based - so I need to do some rethinking. I'd like to come up with one cool level that shows off everything that I've managed to put together thus far.
I'll throw another update up this week sometime, with screenshots. If I manage to get a decent level working I might put out a demo as well; I've gotten more used to Inkscape, and even though I suck at art I've started making all the assets myself.
