amarillion's Blog
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FP
I wasn't even sure if I would have time this weekend, but it looks like I'll have a bit of time at least, enough for a half-baked entry.
I'll be working with Max again as usual.
Finished work, got groceries, had dinner, had time to let the rules sink in. They're not bad, I've got some ideas. Going to have a chat with Max to see what we can do.
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Firsts
This is going to be my first speedhack using Allegro 5, so I can't rely much on previously written code.
I'm building up everything from scratch and haven't got much more than a simple engine at the moment.
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End of Day 2 - all rules in!
Due to work, C++ getting rusty, and because this is my first inroad with allegro 5, I felt we needed to severely limit the scope of this project.
So the screenshot is not much to look at, and I'm afraid it will pretty much stay like that. We're going for a text-based puzzle game, based on navigating a dialog tree.
In spite of that, or actually because of that, we've got a pretty playable game already. And ALL the rules are in. I don't think I've ever done a speedhack where I had a playable game with all the rules fulfilled already on Saturday! Usually I still have three rules to implement on Monday morning.
Not to say it's all easy - I've built a custom interpreter for the dialog trees.
So my remaining time for Sunday will be spent polishing, and making sure there are no dead ends in the dialog trees.
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Polishing
This is going well. It's pretty much finished.
There were a few dead ends in the dialog tree, which we've hopefully ironed out by now.
Now going to write a README.txt
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Presenting B.U.N.
I haven't got much more time anyway, because work will come back in full force on Monday and I need to get some rest.
One of the last remaining tasks for us was to pick a name. Too tired to put much thought in this, so we went with the first thing that came up. So the game is now called B.U.N.
I hope it's not too difficult. I have play tested it so much that I know the puzzle inside out. But how is it going to play out? Is the puzzle too easy or too hard? Is it going to be entertaining enough to keep going until the end?
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Storytelling
It was clear from the start that the dialog tree needed to be in a config file. It started off simple but it quickly grew into a pretty advanced interpreter with nested if/else statements. I resisted the temptation to add boolean operators.
But the great thing was that this allowed Max to spend a lot of time writing storylines. Usually when we do these competitions she starts idly designing some placeholder graphics without a clear idea what the game is going to be like. And she has a lot of storyline ideas but they are severely limited by how fast I can write code. This time though, she could focus on storyline ideas from the start, pretty much from Saturday morning, and graphics are almost an afterthought!
I've attached an early design doc from Friday evening.
