Its been awhile, but progress is being made on my fishy prototype. I have a friend that's mentoring me to help me finish this project. He's a lead designer at a game company right here in town. I'm starting to use some techniques from agile development to make a schedule and track my progress. I have a tenative deadline at the end of June.
I've never written a design document before, but I'm struggling through my first draft for Aquarius. You can see my incomplete design doc here. I think the idea of the doc is to establish every feature the game will have ideally, and the finished schedule will show what I can have done in any given amount of time. *schedule not included
My latest build is just a level where I test anything new and lay out all the creatures so far. I've lined up each type of creature in child/parent sizes, and shown a few in groups. I haven't made half the creatures I want yet.
Demo (windows).
Controls.txt
Mouse to aim.Use E and D to move forward and backward.LMB to move forward.RMB to bite.Mouse Wheel to zoom1-6 zoom level (6 is the highest real-game zoom)~ is autozoom, on by defaultHold R to grow. Caution: growing is fast!Hold T to shrink. Caution: shrinking too small will crash the program!Q AI waypointsG gridW wireframeC collision shapesV extended vision type (off, normal, small circle). Currently quite crappy. M "map" just shows the background gradient. and your position in the world as a red dot. I know its misleading but its not a high priority and wont be available in the game.U toggle culling. Note: you can see if culling is enabled by looking for the waypoints of creatures that are not on screen, there's no real indicator.I toggle the culling radiiEsc pause / menuF2 toggle fullscreen. Note: some textures may disappear. you have to restart to get them back.F5 screenshotF6 experimental, crappy "motion blur" screenshot. SPACE toggle an in-progress control panel for the world. In-progress and not functional!!Oh yeah, I've moved my site to www.soulcraftgames.com and Soulcraft Games will be the name of my futuristic indie company.
Kudos for taking the time to write a design document. If you're going to be pitching the game to anyone professional, that is the way to go.
I tried to check out your demo but the installer didn't work. It stated that it couldn't write any of the files to their destination (one error per file). I figure something is messed up with the installer's permissions (I'm on Win7).
Take care.