Day 239: Mass Effect

I started this blog because I saw a number of my fellow developers making dev-blogs for their projects. I had two thoughts:

1. I won't have anything to blog about: This was the primary reason I haven't blogged in the past, I'm just not that interesting. In this case, though, I can blog often because this is a daily project. Lately, as you've no doubt noticed, this practice has fallen by the wayside. I've continued to work, but writing up the blog post takes a lot more time and so I've tended to skip it.


2. Nobody will read it: How I'm developing my game is of little interest to anyone except pretty hardcore game developers who are familiar with ruby, rubygame, and interested in my game enough to read about it instead of working on their own. This set is maybe three people, five tops. I've since discovered that having the blog is invaluable - I've searched through it a number of times to find how I did something earlier, and the fact that I blogged about it made it simple to look up. Even if no other living soul even glances at this blog, it's already been of enormous use.

So that said, the slow pace of blogging may continue. When I'm writing code, I often have something to say about how I implemented it. When I'm developing content, what I have to say is pretty much "Created a few sectors".

Now, however, I'm coding. I created a ton of sectors and a few planets, and it occurred to me that later, when I've made a "standard array" of ships I want the player to be able to buy, I'm going to have to go back to every single planet I made and put those ships up for sale there.

The upside to being the author of a game editor is that if you don't like how it's doing something, you can change it. Today I began work on the "Mass Distribution" system. Each object has labels (like tags, only I call them 'labels' because I'm already using 'tag') that group it, and the Mass Distribution system will allow you to take a ship, a weapon, a mission, etc, and give it to everything that shares a label. So if I, while creating these new planets, label them something like "alliance, standard, human", I can go back and easily give the standard array of weapons,ships, etc, to all the planets which share whatever tags I want.

I may modify the random mission generator to use this technology as well.