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What I did today
I had less time than I'd hoped today, since a woman took up more of my time than I expected, but on the other hand I needed less time to pin down what I want to do.
I basically set up a to-do list of features that I want to implement in these 30 days, at least in prototype form. These three points
1. Implement the basic combat system as envisioned originally. Make it possible to fight one opponent at a time. This point will take up the most time, since I will spent a lot of time tweaking and playing around with this.
2. Figure out a way to implement fluid multi-opponent combat. I think the first approach I'm going to take on this is by simply figuring out a way to let the player switch between different opponents in a fluid and non-intrusive manner and then basically fighting them 1on1. For example, you might be fighting against some guy and you see someone else coming up behind you, so you can turn around and fight the other guy or something.
3. Give the game a goal. For simplicity, I decided that this will be done by giving the game multiple levels to play through, each level consisting of one static location (think Everyday Shooter-like) with different enemy-types. How many of these I will get done I don't know. Since my game won't have any story though, this can be pretty open ended and will be based on achieving high-scores rather than "playing through the game once and be done with it.
Once all three are implemented and I have some time left, I will have some time to play around. For example, I might implement different weapon types and I might play around with local (or even external via internet) multiplayer, or I might just spend the time to design more levels.
Other than this stuff, I've set up an SVN repository and scrapped some stuff from the code that I'm not going to need (mostly leftovers from the abandoned prototype that I wrote about). I also ported the project over from my PC to my new shiny notebook, since I will do a lot of the coding outside my home (I find it hard to get motivated to work when I'm at home), which took longer than I expected. But now, as far as I know, I'm completely good to go!
Goal for tomorrow
The main goal for tomorrow will be to change my entity system up a little bit (I will go into details about this in tomorrows blog) and get the basic controls of the weapons working.
I think I'm going to implement the entire combat system with focus on mouse-controls for the weapons and keyboard for character movement, but I'm going to keep gamepad controls in mind. Actually, if I don't do it completely wrong it should be relatively trivial to implement local multiplayer (at the very least something like 1 on 1 duels) by the end of it, where one uses keyboard + mouse and one player uses a gamepad.
On top of that there is of course basic graphical representation. Even though you will maybe see three or four different colors on screen, and even though it's 2D, I need to figure out a way to clearly show the current state of the weapon (is it staying still, or is it being swung? what position and angle does it have currently? and so forth).
That's basically it for tomorrow.
Off Topic
On a completely unrelated note: Dear Esther
came out yesterday and I played through it. It's a very unique experience, and you'd be a fool not to at least try it out. It costs a lot for what it offers (simply in terms of content), but in my opinion it was very well worth it.
