Lots of ground to cover today, so lets get started!
Fortess of Terror!!
Well, FoT is slowly steaming ahead, although I just wish the thing would finish itself overnight, because I'm getting kinda tired of the concept, and I'm excited for our next project. Since my last update I've been pretty much adding boring functionality to the game, such as a main menu (which looks kickass thanks to Mark), and making the inventory function as advertised.
The game is really reduced from its original concept, which was to make a good shooter with kickass randomly generated maps. It has now evolved into a fun shooter with extrememly boring randomly generated maps. Mark and I just couldn't come up with that many types of tiles, without having to make an entire different tileset for different room types. The functionality for multiple tilesets is in the game already, we(Read: Mark) just don't want to spend the extra time drawing all the stuff, but if someone really wanted to, they could draw their own, modify a few config files, and have them be in the game.
So yeah, the game is pretty much almost done, I just need to make the enemies a little bit smarter, and add a few things.
The Next Project
As you may have read in Mark's journal, Dogfight Online is out of the question for now, so we sat down today and thought up what other games we wanted to make. We eventually settled on a topdown sandbox-gameplay space shooter. I realized today that every project post-A22 has been essentially one of Ravuya's ideas, just a few months later[wink] Mark's much better at conveying game concepts than me, so I'll just let him cook up a huge entry to explain what the new project will be like....
My Side Project
Ever since we were working on the original Axis Shift game, I've been using the same rendering, animation, and texture atlas code. The system still works pretty well for small projects, but once the textures start piling on, it gets really messy to get stuff done. So I decided that before I began hardcore coding of our next project, I was going to go in and clean up all that old code. Well, my "cleaning up" resulted in the complete rewrite my old system, and I didn't stop there, I began coding up a bunch of modular classes for stuff that I always wanted to have in my projects. So far I've written 4 modules:
-An HTML Logger
-A New Texture Manager
-A Small Polygon Collision Detection System (gonna come in handy later)
-Messaging Framework
All these modules are going to come in crazy handy when we start making our new game, which we don't even have a codename for[grin] Hopefully all the modules will be easy to use, and maybe I can even compile a library for public use....
Well, thats all for now, Here's a random screenshot from FoT to keep you guys satisfied, Peace Out!
You're the Vietnam veteran interim floor manager, and there's an uppity night shift manager who wants your hours. Punch, bite, kick and brutalize them across the store as you use improvised weapons and your own guile to wage a guerilla war against corporate malfeasance.
Yes? No?