Day 323: Game Over

Today marks the last day of National Game Finishing Month. I closed five tickets today, mostly content-related. Every ship that's in part1 of the game is now created. Every weapon that's in the game entirely is done. Even helpful standard addons have been made.

In conclusion, of the list I made yesterday, half of the items are now done. So now, the NaGaFiMo postmortem!

• What went right
  
  
  
  1. Effort The spirit of this exercise was to devote my Nanowrimo time to the game. I've done more than that - as of today, I'm nearly 4.5 hours ahead of schedule. If it were a novel, it'd be done by now.
  
  
  2. Learning While I won't say that I haven't learned anything from the rest of the programming I've done, I've definitely learned more this month. Specifically, I had to create new art via Blender, which I knew how to do long ago but have since forgotten. Making art is definitely out of my comfort zone, but I learned quite a bit.
  
  
  3. Atomic Coding The linked article talks about the practice with Subversion, but I've found it even more effective using git. Having a local repository lets you commit nearly everything once you've made the smallest workable change, yet not embarrass yourself by pushing out to the remote (public!) repository.
  
  
  
  


• What Went Wrong
  
  
  
  1. It's Not Done! The goal of this was to actually have the game finished by now. That didn't happen, but given that I actually put in all the work, I count this as a failure of estimation rather than of effort.
  
  
  2. Learning Yes, that was above on the 'what went right' portion. The downside to learning how to use a tool like Blender is that I had to take time away from the rest of the project in order to do it. If I'd already known blender or already done all this, I'd have ended up a lot closer to the original goal.
  
  
  3. Going Dark Though I updated the blog when I was done with major features, I didn't update daily. As I've found the blog to be useful in the past, I'd like to keep it up.
  
  
  
  


• What I learned
  
  
  
  1. This is Doable This particular schedule works for me. I initially thought 1.5 hours a day might be somewhat difficult, but though not easy, it is at least workable.
  
  
  2. Get it Done Rather than putting off seemingly unrelated work until it absolutely must be done, it's probably better to learn these things when it won't interfere with big goals
  
  
  3. People Might Actually Play This I've had a number of requests for the demo, which while being exceedingly out of date is still a reasonable facsimile of how the game plays. My novels have had only a few token readers, with the vast majority of people who inquire not bothering to actually read them. Everyone who asked for the demo has played it however, making me think that I may have better luck!
  
  
  
  

Day 322: The End is Nigh

National Game Finishing Month is nearly over. Tomorrow I plan to do a marathon of getting stuff into the system then blog resignedly about it. Today, however, was all work.

Specifically, I animated the rest of the ships. Then I created the standard ones in-game, and used Mass Distribution to push them out to every standard planet in the galaxy.

High profile things left to do:

• Random Missions should use labels: The mission system in general could use an overhaul to use the labels, too. It'd be handy for an "are we there yet" check to include "anywhere with this label" as a satisfying condition.


• Fleets: Once I have the ships done, I need to put the patrols, pirates, traders, visitors, etc, in their place so they'll show up in the sectors they're supposed to.


• Alliance/Rebel weaponry: The war-fighters should have better weapons than you as a regular pilot should get (but you can get them later, when you join)


• Alliance Ships: The alliance has three ships specific to them.


• Rebel Ships: Likewise, the rebellion also has ships just for themselves.


• Standard Addons: I don't think I'll have faction-specific addons unless I really get inspired.


• Random Missions: These are essentially the filler of the game.


• Scientist Scout Missions: This is the essense of the plot for the entire game, right here.


• Alliance/Rebel Scout Missions: The only thing close to a major sidequest, this is the initial alliance/rebel war.

Day 294: NaGaFiMo

It's National Game Finishing Month!

My next big part of the game to do is mess with the XML some more - specifically, making it look sane as I advocated a few entries ago. But that would require me to muck with XML again and after the nightmare it was last time, I declined to do so.

Instead, I closed out some old improvements I'd been meaning to do for a while:

• Ownership: The player will now see what faction his/her target belongs to.


• Fuel Regeneration: By default, fuel will now (extremely) slowly regenerate now. So if you're stuck out in the middle of nowhere with no fuel, you can just wait. It'd probably still be faster to save your game and change your ship's 'fuel' value in the XML, but now people less inclined toward cheating can continue to play.


• Description Comments: Sometimes I want to remember something about a planet or sector, i.e. "This is the place where Act I ends". There's no place for comments, so instead of taking the easy route and making a do-nothing 'comments' field, I made it so any string surrounded by /* ... */ would not appear if the game wasn't in edit mode. Instant comments!

I've got to get to that XML at some point, though....

Day 293: No Nano

Lately I haven't been hewing to my 'one hour per day' quota. At all. Whatsoever. And suddenly, hey, it's November and I'm looking at two months until my deadline for releasing this wacky thing. November is, as I've alluded to before, National Novel Writing Month, and I've wanted to participate this year.

THAT ISN'T HAPPENING!

Instead, I'm dedicating my NaNo time to working on this game - an hour and a half per day, every day. My goal is to actually finish everything by the end of the month, giving me a month to hand over the beta to people and watch as they rain bug reports upon my poor undefended soul.

I started a day early - I began phase 1 of my XML overhauls quite a while back. I was suffering from "arrow XML", which looked a lot like this:

<object>
  <child name="foo">
    <other_object>
      <child name="bar">
        <yet_another_object/>
      </child>
    </other_object>
  </child>
</object>

Now imagine it nested about twenty levels deep.

It seemed like it'd be fairly straightforward to write each object out one by one and then just refer to them by ID, but - as it turned out - it wasn't. Changing the way my parser worked exposed some deep bugs in the system that I hadn't seen before, and I was forced to quash them!

Now, however, it works. Thus, National Game Finishing Month begins!