I know what you’re thinking: “He’s not posting anymore, he must be dead! Or he just suffered from another of his “Oh Shinny!” moment and got into Anthropology this time”. But you’ll think again after you’ve seen what I’ve been working on it the last month.
Note: AI doesn’t take decisions yet, No Menu selection (As soon as a party member is ready, his target selection pop-up). Also, no damage calculation yet. Well, hey, that’s a prototype, what did you expect?
To make combat as dynamic as possible, I’ve chosen to go with a timed base selection-action system. As you can see, everyone starts in the selection phase. Once their timer is filled they can decide what action they want to perform (for now, only attack is coded). Once you’ve picked your action and your target, you get transferred to the countdown phase. Once you’re countdown reaches zero, the selected action is performed. This give us a dynamic combat system because actions can take longer to do than other.
What do you guys think?
Changes:
Secret Prophecy: Monster and Party formations.
Secret Prophecy: Target Selection.
Secret Prophecy: Ordered Timer Display
Secret Prophecy: Action animation
Work in progress: Target Validation (So that you can restrict selection to, say, only party members that are poisoned)
With 20 mini-presentation for all taste, this GameCamp was a huge success. I think we had about 150 member and non-member that came to this event. That’s pretty good!
Subjects were very varied and with only 6 minutes each presentations, you couldn’t get bored very long.
After the presentations, I talked a lot with Michael about GDC and the IGDA scholarship. I’m really thinking of going to GDC 2009 either as a CA or apply for the IGDA scholarship. After that I talked with John about Programmer resume, portfolio and stuff that would put chances on my side when sending out internship application next summer.
I don’t mean to sound ungrateful for this award, this is truly a wonderful honor. But, I’m just one person. What the industry needs now is for each one of you to get out there and be an ambassador for games, for game culture, for the profession of game development.
And big kudos to the Kokoromi gang for the well deserved Excellence in Visual Art IGF Award for Fez. And Fish reading his acceptance haiku with a monocle; Just awesome!
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. - Douglas Adams
Yeah yeah, I know I’m 2 weeks late to make my Progress Report. The reason is really simple: Ugly schedule at University + Work Friday,Saturday,Sunday == Not a lot of free time && Not a lot of sleep.
And since I don’t have a lot of free time, I spend most of it playing game instead of programming them. That’s the main reason why I didn’t make it for the challenge 200 -_-;
Challenge 200:
For this progress report : 5h Final score : 185h / 200h
I’m a bit sad that I didn’t make it to the 200 hour mark. But being short of just 15 minutes isn’t bad at all ^_^
All in all, I’m really proud of the experience. In 200h 185h, I created 3 games while building HexEngine and 1 while trying out XNA. Not to shabby eh?
I’ll be repeating the challenge 200 for 2008, but I’m still debating if I’ll continue to work on Secret Prophecy or on an idea I have for a 3D game.
What a year! This is going to be hard to decide! Just for the heck of it I’ll go with 3 predictions:
Best Writing goes to Portal
Best Game Design will also go to Portal
Innovation Award might go to Portal
What are your predictions?
The GDCA, presented by the IGDA, is a peer-based, open nomination awards program where honours are given by developers to developers. The awards will be handed out at the Game Developers Conference, February 20th
