Saturday, October 9, 2010

On to the hard stuff

Not much visible progress to report today... Between having a real job, not sleeping well, playing with the kid, visiting family, and a bunch of other things, I haven't had much time to spend working on the game in the past few days. I did get walls drawn in game, and I got the camera moving around, so that was pretty fun.

Now, though, I'm into the hard stuff. Until now, all the work I've been doing has been prototype work -- just playing around, experimenting with how things work until I get it sorted out. But I've gotten to a point where I'm done all the prototyping and it's time to refine the code and start worrying about things like readability and maintainability. It's an important step, but it does mean that things temporarily slow down, especially on the visual side. In the long term, it'll help me get the game done a whole lot faster though, especially when I start adding whatever new functionality I haven't thought of yet. Good design matters in code!

On tap for this coming week: Generating a map at runtime instead of hard-coding floors, walls, etc. I'm also going to try to get wall tiles to highlight in some way when the mouse is over them, and hopefully clean up the cursor a little and give it a click animation. Even if clicking doesn't do anything, it's disconcerting when there's no visual confirmation for a click!

Next week, I'm planning to start building the real UI side of things; adding a command bar where you enter commands for your minions and having wall tiles highlighted a different colour to indicate pending work.

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