Week 25 – Almost Got It…

Christmas is in the air! All over the internet, TV, and in shops there are christmas-y things. It all makes me rather anxious but at the same time excited, for I know Christmas roughly marks the deadline for the CCSO alpha release.

Anyway, guess what?
This is really difficult work haha. I’ve been struggling this week to understand and create the various contraptions that will form the functioning game. Eugh. But I knew this was never going to be easy; as I’ve been saying all along, you can’t grow from nothing into a full web/game developer with 25 weeks of part-time commitment. Many people work hard for years just to get up to the required level. 😮 But then again, those people may be learning programming for the first time, whereas I have an edge here with a decent amount of past programming experience under my belt.

CC Survival is a complex game with all its unique components, and I have the difficult task of creating a general structure that can handle absolutely any situation that exists while also being flexible enough to work with any future components that are added. Even for a veteran developer this is not simple.

A lot of my time has actually been spent on ensuring the code is as flexible as possible, so I can add new features without pain.

My main work this week has been designing a sign-up system for games, where players can select a unit they have made and then join a game. It is basically working. Like as much as how a human is basically an animal.

It has been a lot of backend work again, so there isn’t much in the way of content to show 😦 The game content is more or less all ready to go though and all I have to do now is code the components.  Expect a mid-week update this week 😛 A video showing a functioning game. Or so I hope.

Now in other news…

Flash?

A completely random discovery I came across literally a few hours ago was that PHP can communicate with AS3 (known as ‘flash’ to all you non-programmers). This could mean I would be able to embed a flash game on the site and have the game server communicate with PHP and then PHP communicate with the flash to display everything.

This would allow a massive amount more functionality than a text and image based website ever could. Before this CCSO project came up, I was considering learning a bit of AS3 anyway.

The idea here would be to have PHP calculate everything like it is at the moment, but then have the display and intake (output/input) being within the flash media to make it look awesome and be super interactive.

It’s a nice dream anyway, but a task this big? pssh! Never gonna happen. (oh wait.. deja vu anyone?)

Right now it is not going to happen though. Learning and coding in 5 languages is quite enough, thank you. I will simply not be able to handle this task if it was much harder. But…

What about in the far future?

How about I make the full game now, and then once it is stable I can devote time into learning AS3 and perhaps start working towards converting parts of the game to it? Seems good to me. At least worth a shot.

Maybe even after the CCSO Beta release there will be a CCSO Gamma version before it enters public release. Who knows. Although I kind of know myself well enough to know that I will end up giving this a go lol.

Just don’t expect it anytime soon.

Will the Alpha be Ready for Week 30?

Gasp that is like …soon. It is all slotting into place nicely, but the amount of work left to do should not be underestimated. Wait and see the mid-week video to see what has been done. Sorry for the wait! See you in a few days 🙂