Week 27 – Everything is Awesome!

Everything is cool when you’re part of a team… [not too late, am I?]

Massive Strides in Game Progress

FIXED BUGS:
* Dead units coming back to life with ridiculous health quantities.
* Only being able to select your latest design to play with.
* List of signed up players to a game now works as it should.
* If two players had a unit with the same name, the game broke when the second player selected this unit.
* Movement now defaults to 0 at the start of every round. So if you moved up 3 last round, you won’t unknowingly move up 3 in the current round by not submitting movement. Same for votes and abilities.
* Certain usernames could completely cock-up the game. Added a layer of protection against this.

ADDED FEATURES:
* Game dynamically generates a list of players within your min/max range for you to vote for. There is an optional abstain choice.
* Attacking works! Players with more than two votes will be attacked.
* Your unit on the battlefield is now bolded.
* Made the layout more spacey and added section titles, moved a few parts around, and created guidance text (see below pic) to offer a reminder to new players on how to play. All part of the scheme to make CCS more welcoming. At some point I’ll offer an option of disabling this text so veterans don’t have to see it.
* Actions are now displayed. (your movement, vote and abilities).
* Level up display added.
* Can now cancel votes and abilities. Abilities can only be cancelled on the round they are activated on.
* Health bar! Woo!

KNOWN BUGS/MISSING FEATURES:
* Votes are not listed or kept past a round.
* The level up screen only displays to the user who ends the round
* Rounds do not end automatically.
* Unit powers and status effects are not shown.
* You can play games without them being full. (but this is a great feature to test games with so it will be the last thing I fix :P)

No video this week as the game basically hasn’t changed. It just works a lot better now. But here is a barrel load of pics (click for bigger images).

1. Full game screen as current.

2. Level up display. All numbers are fully functional.

3. Working signed-up list for games.

4. Fully working health bar, close up. The full bar can be seen in the first pic.

Pictures are amazing aren’t they? 😛 No new components have been added to the game yet… and those last few bugs need to be fixed. Other than that the game is ready for Alpha pretty much. I still want to make the site just a tad easier to navigate before the Alpha release but that won’t take long.

Following from this, does anyone know of a good php web server host that is fairly cheap and can support the game? Something that doesn’t have too huge of a restriction on computer time or database size would be good. I’ve been reading reviews and http://www.siteground.com/ comes out on top by far. Has anyone ever hosted with them before? What are your thoughts? Are there better hosts out there? Siteground does offer a money back guarantee… tempting. I read through their entire ToS earlier today and they don’t seem that bad. (yeah, I’m one of the few people in the world who actually reads ToS’s… but only when I am risking my own captial haha.)

Anyway…

We Have Passed 100 Views!

Since the week 24 post, we have reached over 100 blog views. In fact, we reached 100 last Sunday, and right now we have 141 views. They are increasing really fast now we have established a presence.

Oh and there was a massive spike in visits on Thursday. Were you guys expecting me to release another mid-week update? 😮 Unfortunately, they will be quite rare…

More Art!

So many pics this week, wow. This is a pretty major update.

Missile and Far Sight 😛 Thank our awesome Laura!

The blog background has been updated, as I promised last week, with all this art. It looks so awesome 😛 I’m sure you have already noticed it.

Progress Sheet updated saying with these two new pieces. Although no component statuses have changed colour this week 😦

This Week

The previously mentioned bugs will be fixed and a bunch of components should be in the game.

But with everything programming… you never can tell what is going to happen.

I always try my best for your guys though 🙂

Three weeks until the alpha, will it be ready?

Certainly seems so. If all that is left are a few bug fixes and adding a reasonable set of components, then there isn’t that much work remaining. The alpha release is definitely in sight!

An early alpha release is even possible if things go swimmingly, but I wouldn’t hold on to my boat for that one. Might just get shipwrecked yet…

Week 26 – Anyone Have Any Bug Spray?

BUGS EVERYWHERREEEEEEE!!!!!

And these ones do not make a satisfying crunch when you squish them. They are more the gooey type. ;(

Game [mostly] [kinda] Works!

Well. Yeah. CCSO does work, but it doesn’t work work.

This task of creating a playable game is much more complicated than anything I have done before. As I reach new skill levels, the bugs level up too. My ability to code in these languages has increased sharply over the past 26 weeks and still continues to rise, and this has meant I have been able to code more in less time. What took me an afternoon 6 months ago now takes me 5 minutes. But that was because I wasn’t expanding my horizons…

Now I am heading towards what will turn out to be the most complex part of CCSO, there are many new bugs. Ones that I have never seen before and have no idea how to fix. I’m gradually getting there, but I have fallen a tad behind schedule. However, I have managed to get a system working at a base level. In fact, this system has a lot of the final features already in it – there are only a handful missing.

Video!

The damage I select is damage to deal to myself. I have been using it to test the damage mechanics. The abilities do not work right now, but the cooldowns do. I know the video looks like it was a bit rushed. It was. I wanted to get this out on time. A higher quality and more final version of the alpha game will be shown next week.

What this video shows:
* Creating a game.
* Joining a game.
* Viewing the game.
* Selecting movement.
* A dynamically generated battlefield.
* Taking damage correctly – both normal and AP (armour-piercing) damage.
* Round Updates. E.g. health and damage upgrading, 5% heal, UP increasing, cooldowns decreasing, etc., etc.
* Unit death and removal from field.

What is missing:
* Interaction with other players (e.g. attacking, using abilities.)
* Abilities. No active abilities work currently and they cannot be upgraded.

So overall, it isn’t actually that far off a full system. And even though the work fell short of the target, I am happy that I have managed to conquer most bugs and have learnt from them. These skills will help in the future.

Besides, if everything worked first time, where would the fun be? 😛 The satisfaction you get when you squish a bug… haha, it is almost as satisfying as when you do it IRL.

Progress Sheet

So my original plans for the Alpha release when we first discussed it was to have a very basic prototype game with a few of the simpler components in it. It actually looks like this target will be superseded should these bugs leave. There are likely to be many components available.

Rather than filling up this blog with a list of components that are in the game, I have instead created a PDF that displays the progress of all components in a visual form.

Find It Here

Each component is coloured according to:
RED = not in the game or very faulty. Can’t use this component.
YELLOW = partially added. Has bugs, is non-functional, or lacks full features.
GREEN = Is in the game. Usable.
BLUE = Is in the game AND has been tested to a basic level.
(the red is very dark and the green is fairly light, to help [I hope] anyone who has red-green colour blindness.)

Components should drift towards all being Blue over time. However, if a Green or Blue listed one is tested and a bug is found, it will revert to Yellow, so there is a chance that some components could go backwards.

In addition to colours, an A is added to components that have art.

Next Steps

1. Fix the bugs.
2. Make the game fully functional.
3. Add more components.

Perhaps there will be a better video next week 😛

Background of the Blog

You may have noticed the new blog background. I was only trying it out – it isn’t staying. When more art comes out I will replace it with a collage of component art.

Is Alpha Going to be On Time?

Probably. I’m sure I’ll figure it out.