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 🙂

Week 24 – Welcome to CC Survival Online!

New to CC Survival? Click here to learn more.

Welcome everyone to the new CC Survival blog! Yeah, it’s WordPress, I know; but hey, it’s free 😛

Up until now the project, codenamed CCSO, has been kept a secret only known to the most experienced CC Survival players. Today, this all changes. This week is the 24th week since the very first blog post where I outlined what I wanted CC Survival Online to be and, although the idea was around in the few weeks running up to this, I am declaring that original post to be our true starting point.

Anyway, I shan’t dwell on the past 23 weeks for those new here for this blog would be massive if I did, but do ask questions if you want to know anything. Let’s get straight to business.

New Music

Harmless has updated his One Shot at Victory track to make many of the notes clearer. Furthermore, an extended version has been released!

Find all the music here:
Track 2 – One Shot at Victory (v1.2). Extended (v1.2).
Track 1 – Light Urgency.
These songs are owned by harmless and cannot be used without his permission.

YouTube

We do have a YouTube channel: CC Survival. And our main videos are:
* Unit Creator: Proof of Concept. In the future this will be improved massively and offer search features, easier navigation, and clearer looks. Right now it works fully and even displays errors if you create an invalid design.
* Just How Many Abilities Are There? Just for show. But let’s not forget that each individual ability needs to be coded in the final game. There is a lot of work to do.
There will certainly be more videos out in the future, so subscribe to the channel if you want the videos as soon as they go up, instead of waiting for me to post about them.

Core Game Development

My latest work is designing the core gameplay. That is, some sort of mechanism where you can launch an attack against another unit and the game works everything out. Now, this may sound very simple to do, but I have found out that quite the opposite is in fact true.

What I have managed to create so far is a large database that stores all unit information during the game. So for example when a player is damaged, their database health value drops, and then next round these values will be collected and output to every player. Ability upgrades have been the hardest part as when an upgrade is purchased the system needs to scan through the ability’s text, locate what needs changing, change it and nothing else, and then add to an upgrade counter to prevent upgrades being purchased more times than is allowed. It was a tricky system to get working, and in fact it isn’t working fully yet, but is almost there and looks like it will be fine. Next week maybe.

In addition to this, I have made a quick test dummy that will eventually be able to fight back and use its own abilities automatically.

Of course, the first two abilities are made up, but are there to test and play around with when the time comes.

It may not seem like there has been much work this week, but the entire backend gameplay is taking good shape. There is just little actual progress to show on the forefront. Don’t worry though, next week should bring some nice updates I hope 🙂 There is a lot to do and designing the gameplay of a full game is a massive task, especially when all this is new so I’m having to take the challenges as they come; I cannot foresee many of them. I can’t guarantee a basic working system by next week, but I will try. There is just so much that needs to be done first.

Will the alpha release be ready for the end of the year?

It is honestly too hard to tell at this stage, but the project certainly isn’t behind schedule.