Weekly update

Another slow week for the AGP. Not much new to report on the programming side of things as I spent most of my time working on dissertation stuff. I did some more designy ideas work and finalised a few things. The map in the game will now be made up of multiple continents rather than the type of map you can see in the map generation thing I've already made. I tried to program this a bit on Friday while at university but didn't get past generating a random tangle of tiles for the continent to be grown from. Once I get the continents generated though, most of the code I already have will work with little adjustment.

My attentions programming-wise have been turned elsewhere however, as I've been tasked with getting examples some of the other dynamic generation stuff and actual gameplay done for Friday. Wish me luck. I'm also planning to get some of the design/pre-production paperwork written up properly this week as well as redoing my draft dissertation proposal.

So it looks like another busy week for me, hopefully it shouldn't be too stressful. My current addiction to Dawn of War 2 probably isn't going to help matters though. Be seeing you.

Even more map generation

I can't keep my hands off of this bloody grid! My program now generates a map and draws graphics from a tileset onto the screen in the appropriate places. Now we're getting somewhere.

(does it remind anyone else of Animal Crossing?)

More map generation

I know I wasn't supposed to be programming much this week but LOOK A RIVER. (fields have been changed to "."s, water to "o"s)

Weekly report - 11/10/09

Didn't get what I wanted done this week, mainly due to procrastination. I really must delete Freecell.

On to what I did get done. I did get my ideas down on paper and do some other design work like a SWOT analysis (which will probably be redone soon anyway) but I wanted to get a lot further than I have.

As for the programming side of things, I have managed to get a dynamic map generation system going, purely in text/ASCII art form in a command line console thing. As can be seen in my screenshot over there, it's currently an 11x10 grid with two rows of sea (~) at the bottom, colums of rocks (@) on either side and a row of mountains (^) at the top. A 2x2 castle (#) is placed randomly with restrictions that stop it overlapping with the borders of the map. Four towns (H) are placed randomly with restrictions that prevent them overlapping the castle or from being vertically or horizontally adjacent to other towns. The next step is to get graphics from a tileset applying to each grid space. And then I might add a forest or something.

It's nowhere near what will be used in the final game (I have much bigger plans), but it is a reassuring step forward.

The programming is going to have to take a backseat this week as I have lots of design work to do in preparation for pitching my game to my tutors this Friday. I also have a lot of reading to catch up on for my dissertation and a draft dissertation proposal to be writing.

It's going to be a busy week. Be seeing you.

Well would you look at that.

I met Charles Cecil (Beneath a Steel Sky, Broken Sword) and Dave Gibbons (Beneath A Steel Sky, Watchmen, 2000AD, general comic art supremo) today, and had a nice chat about Gibbons with a random scouse bloke on the tube home. Overall, a good night. Cheers Dave.

Now lets hope that Heroes doesn't disappoint tonight.

Hello World

Evening. The primary purpose of this blog is to act as a production diary for my year 3 uni work, primarily my Advanced Game Project but anything particularly interesting that turns up from my work on my dissertation may appear on here as well. Inane ramblings may also occur from time to time. 

So, this AGP. The current plan is to make an RPG in which the game world and events are dynamically generated. There'll be no set story; what the player does will define the course of the game. The game world itself will be constructed upon starting a new game; no two games will be the same. Also, it will be impossible to "game over"; if you die there will be some way to get back to life, failing a task will simply result in a different outcome to you succeeding in that task. This will all be in 2D and programmed by yours truly (probably in C++).

That's the initial plan, anyhow. We'll soon see what actually happens.

In actual "what am I up to" news, I spent some of today refamiliarising myself with what little programming I know and attempting to get my head around a few new things. The process helped me to realise that I'm going to have to get my arse in gear if I actually want to do the stuff I plan to. All in all, not the most productive of days but useful nonetheless.

How I intend to spend this week:
- Getting the mess of ideas in my head on to paper and cutting 90% of them.
- Getting stuck in to this programming lark and getting some of the fundamentals of the game in place.

I think that's all for now. Be seeing you.