Weekly Assesment

Moving into the final weeks of classes so unfortunately this blog got lost amongst all the other activities battling for my attention.

No shortage of things to talk about though. Time constraints have forced us to the point that I believe we have decided to drop 'combat' completely. We can, as our digital prototype showed, create an enjoyable game without needing to bring in that type of interaction directly. We can create a game based around simpler interactions with the AI, ie what was seen in the tag version of the AI. This cut brings our project to a point that I believe is quite good- I'm getting close to the point of being finished implementing the content structure, and thus hopefully we will be able to spend the last week after the 4th just creating more and more interesting maps.

What I have worked on in the last bit was first the debug system. This wouldn't go into a final product, but its been wonderful for getting feedback from my teammates (which was non exist ant before this) I have also added a mouse look system, that helps the player see their surroundings. Personally I don't know if I like this feature, but as the option exists to ignore it, and my teammates liked it, it will remain. The final component, which has become one of the most interesting components to this entire project is the trigger system which I have partially implemented, and will hopefully finish tonight.
Basically my trigger system is based off of the Warcraft 3 trigger system. Any selection of a number of conditions are grouped together, and tied to a selection of effects. Each program loop each set of conditions is checked, and if all true, all effects tied to them are set off. This allows the map creator to emulate so many different types of effects such as teleports, destroying bridges, and so much more. This is definitely a system I will be using again in a future project. Its adaptability shows quite a bit of promise to me.
In general this engine has definitely succeeded in the goal I set out to reach- create an adaptable environment which can be extensively altered without needing to compile anything. I could take the engine Ive made and create a completely different game with this, in comparatively little time.
My teammates have been generally pretty good about coming to meetings, but I still feel like I have to try to much to get them to send me the content. For example I told them quite clearly that I needed anything they wanted in the game on tuesday by yesterday night, and only one teammate met that requirement. Ill move forward how I can though.