Progress report

Posted by Glenn on Thursday, 1 July 2010 9:15am

Hi everyone. I thought it was timely to make a meaningful post as to what Justin and I have been up to in the last couple of months. As much as we'd like to, we can't seem to achieve our goal of regular releases so, just to assure people that work is being done to improve this project of ours, here is what we've been doing.

Mission Editor:
A huge amount of effort is going into a browser based mission editor. The tool will give us (Justin and I) and users (you) the means to create a map (including roads, trees, buildings etc) and the ability to do basic scripting actions such as deploying units, and specifying when objectives are completed etc.

It's a massive effort and, although currently requiring a bit of a UI tidy up, has certainly made making missions a heck of a lot easier. I'll admit it and say that this beast has been totally Justin's doing. I just made all the in-game mechanic. Using json seems to be a stroke of awesome.

More open ended mission endings:
Where Justin has done the mission editor, my pet goal for this release was to make the missions not stop suddenly when the mission is completed. I'd dug up Star Wars Tie Fighter and admired the concept of Primary, Secondary and bonus objectives. It makes sense then, that such objectives needn't be done in any particular order, so forcing the game to finish when the main objectives were complete, had to change. This allows us in the future to implement cool things like:

• Dynamically adding mission objective during a mission
• Have secret objectives that the player is unaware of until the're done (such as eliminating enemies within a certain time, taking no damage etc)
• Secondary objectives that might complement some kind of additional story line
• Some kind of hidden objective that the user has to find on every mission, such as enemy weapons caches. Kind of like relics in Tomb Raider.

Accelerometer:
I had a play at using the accelerometer on iPhone, but, although it works, I've got all the calibration/direction/sensitivity incorrect. Obviously I've taken some naive approach which is totally wrong, thus this requires a lot more work.

Wish List:
I've been watching 'Generation Kill' recently, so figured we should make a Cobra Helicopter and some Humvees. Yes, enemy helicopters and alternate playable helicopters are on the todo list, but the mission editor and new mission ending system is the big deal for this release.

Stay tuned...