Week 36 – The End of CCSO :(

Today is the last update.

But we’ll get back to that in a bit.

 

I’ve been playing around with the upgrade system for abilities. It’s been frustrating this week and I’ve not managed to get nearly as much done as I had hoped. Even the simplest of things take a long time sometimes. This hurts me a lot more than it pains you as I have this huge project laid out in front of me and if I spend so long doing one tiny part of it, it is going to take forever to finish. Really demotivational.

But that is what has been happening since the start. There have been fast and slow parts, and usually it is the parts that should be fast that take the longest and the long parts that end up getting done pretty quickly.

For now though I have added a basic system for when you upgrade an ability the main arena page shows the upgrades above the ability text. Yes, it is crude. I was just trying it out to see how it would work. In the future these upgrades will be listed more compactly and the text will update to reflect these purchases.

Try it out and tell me if anything weird happens ^^

 

Art!

These look a lot better on the alpha site 😉 Thanks Shoopadoo for Magma Missiles and Tempest! I have long since exhausted my vocabularly of positive words. So yeah… these are very, very, very, good. That will have to do for this week 😛

 

Anyway, now what you have all been thinking about…

CCSO Shutdown

CCSO isn’t completely over don’t worry. I’ve just been using strong language to keep you engaged here. I’m as sly as ever.

But CCSO is going to pause now until the summer (about 4 months). I have classes at uni again and may not be able to keep up with weekly updates. I know my aim for today was to have a working playable game. And yes, in many ways I have done that, but we have fallen massively short. My inexperience has really shown over the past few weeks. This is more complicated than I first believed it to be and has required a much greater amount of work.

It’s all a good learning experience, but it isn’t the best production experience.

But Some Good News

I actually seem to have much fewer lectures this semester than I thought. I may actually be able to devote quite a bit of time to CCSO still. This doesn’t mean regular updates though so shhhh.

I have had enough of playing around with the core game for now. I really need a break from it to keep my motivation up. I have a new plan for the coming months, see what you think:

• Massively reduced update frequency.
• Focus on redesigning the site for the Beta version.
• Addition of all the sections in the final game (although some will be blank) and a working forum.
• Brand new unit creator based on the sketch I put a few weeks back.

The redesign of the site will use all my new skills from the past few months and will make it compatible with mobile devices, tablets, and all screen resolutions. You may notice at the moment that on a screen with high-resolution there are empty regions down the right and left of the alpha site, and the site isn’t mobile friendly at all.

Wait, do all you Americans call mobile sites cell phone sites? I have never actually thought of this before. Since you don’t call mobiles as mobiles, you also don’t call mobile sites as mobile sites? Hmm, get back to me on this one. I’m pretty curious.

Anyway, yes, this new site will be carefully designed to work on all devices. I have those skills.

I am going to make the site actually look good. The current core game may have some minor updates as I already know now that I’m too addicted to actually get away from it completely. But it isn’t going to be the focus of work. Of course, if things go really well and I have time left after everything else before summer, I will get back to it.

I’ll be sure to post the odd major update here and there as I make progress. Probably in the form of videos. And I’ll keep our artists and musician making stuff when they can and will showcase it perhaps weekly still.

I won’t be able to tell you the exact date that I’ll be back to normal work on CCSO, but it is right near the start of summer.

 

A Reflection – in FAQ style.

Should I do the same as you and jump straight into a many-year project using languages I don’t even know?

No. lol. It has been fun, I’ll admit that. But the only reason I am still doing this is because of you guys. If you don’t have a hell of a lot of willpower yourself and a supportive community behind you, then you will fail. No other way. Just don’t follow in my footsteps.

Instead start with smaller projects and build up your skills before trying something so big. I guess in some ways I regret my decision, but in other ways I’m glad I took this challenge on. But definitely, this has been the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. It has stretched my skills to their very limits and changed me as a person.

How does it feel to be a game developer?

It feels really awesome. I, like a lot of young men, was struggling before to find my place in life and actually give my life meaning. It just kind of felt like I was going along with the flow of everything without ever achieving anything. Many of you are still too young to experience this, but once you have spent a few years living independently with the whole world as your playground, you soon start to feel very small.

Everyone needs some kind of meaning to their life, something they are proud of and can focus their time and energy into. CCSO is it for me. If you are reading this and feel like your life has just stagnated completely, try a personal project. It will really help. I actually think a lot of people go through this phase. I know it is particularly common in young men, but probably most people will experience it at some point.

Game development itself it pretty cool. It is so rewarding to see people playing your game, even if they only send you bug reports. I wouldn’t give this up for anything 🙂

 

Eh, those are the only questions I can think of right now. But I still have much more to talk about.

Weekly updates. Yes, no. My work between weeks has been inconsistent in terms of what you see. I think in the future I may knock it down to every two weeks for updates so that the updates are larger and more consistent between weeks. It can also be stressful on busy weeks to still get content to you guys.

And er… apparently I didn’t have much more to talk about. Hm. I think getting away from this project and focusing on other things for a while will actually do me a lot of good. Breaks are good.

 

TL;DR

What are you playing at? My blogs are awesome. Read them.

• Fewer game updates for ~4 months.

• Not focusing on CCSO for ~4 months.

• Will still be working on it though. CCSO isn’t ending 😛

• Huge update in summer featuring redesigned site with full features.

See you all… soon.

 

Week 35 – (-.-) but POTATO SHOOTER!

Amazon Web Services is the second biggest load of bull I have ever seen, coming just behind an actual field of bulls. They are the most horrible host I have ever had. Their customer services is slow (took like 4 days for a single reply) and they don’t tell you anything useful. Erg -.- But I guess you get what you pay for: Amazon hosting is by far the cheapest.

After a long struggle and a lot of lost time, I have finally managed to get CCSO back online. Some recent data would have been lost and I don’t know exactly how much. My best guess is it could be up to a month of lost data. This doesn’t affect the code (which I have backed up all the time) but will affect things such as accounts, unit submissions, and games. If you can’t log in it may mean your account was lost. Terribly sorry, but I didn’t think Amazon could mess this up so badly.

I believe the problem was with one of the storage sites, which I have since shut down and I am now using a different storage method. I was using the original storage since the very beginning of CCSO and never had a problem with it. I just don’t get why in the middle of the night it started to play up.

I’ll try to backup CCSO on a weekly basis now until I can figure out how to do it automatically. In the meantime, I’m going to continue with Amazon, but if they really mess up this much again I will be switching to another provider.

tl;dr Amazon Web Services sucks but is cheap; CCSO is back up.

Upgrades Done

Despite the lost time this week, I have completed the base upgrade function of abilities. Abilities still can’t be used yet. Check out the upgrade button under abilities within a game. On the upgrade screen the number left of the upgrade checkbox is the number of times you have purchased that upgrade. Checkbox will become an X when the upgrade limit is reached – this is one for most upgrades. You can purchase multiple upgrades for one ability at a time.

UP are subtracted with upgrades but you can go below 0 UP. This is intentionally and not a bug. It makes it easier to test while we search for bugs. I’ll add in a 0 limit next week.

Awesome Art

Yep, the Potato Shooter is literally you throwing a potato at someone. That explains why it is free 😛

Punypuncher top right. Just look at that detail though 😛 It is just… amazing xD Part of me thinks it may fit better as the Ol’ Reliable, but I guess we wait and see how things turn out. It isn’t hard to swap pieces around.

Central is Smoke both with and without the CCSO background. Simple but effective. These four named pieces are by Shoopadoo.

Lower left is Ice Core by Eldromedario with a black background added to make it look just that much cooler. (cooler, geddit?). It will be in CCSO tomorrow ^^

And finally, Laura isn’t dead! Lolwut, such surprise, much doge, clap. She has made a comeback with what is simply a masterpiece of work. It looks kind of like one of those pieces you find hanging up in an art gallery ^^.

Shoop has been doing a bit of everything, but has told me she plans to focus mostly on weapons in the future to avoid clashes with Eld and Lau.

The Team

Programming and Coordination: Keyholefixed
Weapon (mostly) Artwork: Shoopadoo
Chassis Artwork: Eldromedario
Ability Artwork: Laurasnake
Music: Harmless

And let us not forget the works of the players, contributors, and community that form CCS. If you have ever sketched a single component – or even six pages of them – or have ever suggested an idea, or have played a game, or have created a unit to share with others, or even posted a single message in CCS, then you are part of the story and part of the reason why we have been so successful up to here.

There exists many challenges in our way, and there probably will always be, but in a year from now I want to read these old blog posts and say “yes, we have moved on so far since that day.” I want the game to be non-recognisable compared to the current version. Superior in every way.

We have a long way to go; but we are making a lot of progress.

Passed 700 Views!

Yes, we are well on our way to 1000 ^^ Also, check out the side menu of this blog (that thing on the right) I have added a view counter to the top and about halfway down is a slideshow of some select art pieces.

For this slideshow the controls overlap the art and cover it up. I have no idea who designed this but they didn’t test it enough. There is plenty of room for the controls under or above the art, and I guess that is where they are supposed to be. Not too sure if the controls cover the art by design or not. I cannot control the layout of it.

 

Futureee

Even when my university semester starts again, I am going to make time where I can for CCSO. Updates will slow down to a near standstill, but I hope to gradually build up something much more developed that I can release once my exams are finished. In fact, I’m hoping the game will move into ‘late alpha’ by early this summer, and probably into Beta by mid Autumn/Fall.

I have been thinking about it, once the gameplay is finally working, all remaining projects are smaller. I really think this gameplay is the toughest part in terms of functioning code, but other sections such as creating a fully working single player campaign is going to have its own challenges even if the core game is fully working.

Once the core game is working, CCSO coding is going to become a lot more fun. In many ways I am getting a little tired of tinkering with the play mechanics continuously, but you know, if everyone gave up when things became slightly boring, nothing would ever get done.

I’ll figure it out 😛

 

See you next week!

And you’re welcome for getting CCSO back up ^^