Lines of Code

Total: 9508
New: 677

New Achievements:

Game Over: You implement the ability for players to lose the game. (Also, you just lost the game.)

Head Banger: Use recursion in some form in one of your games. (I don't recall, specifically, but I remember seeing ReSharper's little recursion icon, so I'm counting it.)

100 Hours: You spend at least 100 hours programming your game during the month. (I'm pretty sure I'm there now.)

Victory: Beat your game for the first time!

Pretty Pictures

Accomplishments

• Made it so you couldn't "Join Game!" without having at least a user name and host name supplied. Checking for a functioning server at the other end would be an improvement, but that can wait.
• Lots of improvements to UI framework code.
• Added an Exit button to the main menu.
• You can now host a game with a single click, by pushing the "Host Game" button. No configuration allowed. But this means that the server is no longer a standalone application. You just start a server instance from within your game.
• Implemented victory conditions. The game now tells you whether you won or lost.
• When the game ends, it now goes to a Results screen, which proclaims you victorious or defeated. Of course, you have to wait until all players win/lose, so if you lose first and there are two AI players, you have to wait for them to fight to the death first. The other caveat is that this doesn't work with client/server games yet.
• You can go from the results screen back to the Main Menu and start a new game.
• You can quit directly from the in-game screen.

Basically, the work I've done has made the game feel much more like a game real game, and less like a work-in-progress. There's a lot that I still want to accomplish with this game, but it definitely feels a lot more rounded out than it did 24 hours ago.

Lines of Code

Total: 8831
New: 127

New Achievements:

None.

Pretty Pictures

None tonight. It looks exactly like the last screenshot.

Accomplishments

• The game now uses the settings you put in for joining a game, and it works pretty well, if I do say so myself!

It took a surprisingly high number of lines of code to make it happen. I'm really not sure why. It's mostly just some data binding code to hook the UI up to the object that stores the network objects. It didn't seem that big.

Anyway, I think it's bed time for me, so I'm going to go to sleep and hopefully be able to make some good progress on the UI tomorrow. I think this networking stuff is now more or less behind me!

Lines of Code

Total: 8704
New: 646

New Achievements:

None.

Pretty Pictures

Accomplishments

• I've got it now so that the menu shows "Join Game" and "Host Game". It kinda reminds me of some of the games I played in the 90's… Seems like now most games just automatically connect to some sort of central server system. Whatever.
• You can enter values in the text boxes! But those values do you no good, because the game still connects with the default settings.

Unfortunately, I'm still sorta working on networking stuff. If, and I'm still not there. I'm close, but if I don't finish it on Friday, I think I'm going to just move on and leave the networking stuff alone. I've got more UI to make…

Lines of Code

Total: 8058
New: 141

New Achievements:

None.

Pretty Pictures

Still no pretty pictures. I did get some things working that made a slight difference in the UI, but nothing truly worth showing off.

Accomplishments

• I got everything swapped out and using my improved UI framework, and I think it works much better than ever before.
• I've effectively removed references to XNA in my screen and UI classes, which means if I decide to swap XNA out for SharpDX to put it on Windows 8 Phones or the Windows Store I'm safe, and if I swap it out for OpenGL to hit Linux, Mac, or other platforms, I'm also safe.

So I'm basically up to where I was at a couple of days ago, but with better infrastructure. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to start putting that to good use.

Wait, what? Is it really Day 18?

Lines of Code

Total: 7917
New: 471

It seems like a lot of code, but I don't have anything to actually show for it…

New Achievements:

None.

Pretty Pictures

No pics today, but there should be some more interesting things tomorrow!

Accomplishments

• One of my big complaints yesterday what that I kind of wasted the day. But today, upon thinking about it, I realized that even if what I did wasn't technically necessary, my formatter is much more compressed than the default binary serialization. That's actually a huge win, saving my game probably 60-80% of its bandwidth.
• I got quite a bit done on pulling in a more formal/thorough UI framework, instead of just my StupidButton class. That's still not done, but I should be able to wrap it up and start putting it to good use tomorrow.

The plans for tomorrow is to get this UI framework all connected, and to start adding new UI stuff, instead of just reworking old stuff. I'm seriously thinking that Step #1 will be to add another menu item (or another screen to the game) that lets you choose whether you want to host a game or join a game. This would eliminate the standalone server that I currently have, which will make it nice again for players trying to set things up.

Oh crap! And I forgot that I was going to add the 3D model that DerpyIsAlive gave me! Tomorrow!

Lines of Code

Total: 7446
New: 409

New Achievements:

None, though tomorrow, I'll probably invent an achievement for making a networked game. I totally deserve that.

Pretty Pictures

Nothin' today. It would look just like yesterday, but with a happier RB.

Accomplishments

• I spent all day writing my own custom formatter. I think it improved things, but didn't magically fix them. It still crashed on my wife's computer more often than not (but that's an improvement).
• So I pulled out my work computer and gave it a go there. It worked all three times! Maybe it's just something wrong with my wife's computer, or maybe my work computer is just faster (it's actually a pretty sweet laptop) and can handle it or something. Though it was on Wi-Fi, while my wife's was wired.

Tomorrow might actually be a UI day. That's the plan for this week. UI, UI, UI.

Lines of Code

Total: 7037
New: 304

New Achievements:

None.

Pretty Pictures

Might be a little too much Indiana Jones. That font sure is distinctive…

Accomplishments

• I've begun adding in a menu system.
• You can now start a single player game, or a LAN game, which would theoretically allow you to connect to a remote server.

The networking stuff works really well on a single machine. I can connect with two clients and play a game. But the second I move off to another machine, things go bad in unpredictable ways. I think I'm ultimately going to need to write my own IFormatter implementation, instead of the default BinaryFormatter. Which sounds like a giant pain to do. I'm not looking forward to it….

So this next week was scheduled for UI work. I've gotten a start on it, but this week is kind of making me nervous. We'll have to see how it goes. I may or may not do this formatting fix for the networking first, which could cut into the UI stuff by a day or two.

Download #3

Here's the link for Download #3: psb/PSB-Release3.zip
And for the standalone server: psb/PSB-Server.zip

The server may not stay standalone for long, and won't work out of the box anyway. It's looking for config files but can't find the client's version of said files. If you're really curious, I can walk you through it. Otherwise, maybe just wait a few days or a week until the next download. I suppose more than anything it's a bit of proof that I got something done this week, even if it doesn't magically work out of the box for people. At least the client with single player works!

Lines of Code

Total: 6733
New: 794 (Includes the lines I wrote late into the night/morning on Sunday.

New Achievements:

• The Buddy System: Spend all or part of the challenge building a game in a team.
• 3 AM Code Fest: You spend several hours programming your game between the hours of midnight and 6 AM. Beer and pizza optional.
• Lonely: Program on a Friday or Saturday evening. (That's a new one. I saw it elsewhere and really liked it, so I pulled it into our competition.)

Pretty Pictures

Accomplishments

• The full game state is being transferred to and from the server and its clients.
• The human player can now actually play from a client.
• You can connect with multiple human players to a server. The game is currently always a four player game, with two humans and two AIs.

This includes everything I was doing late into the night, and so I won't be getting as much done today. But my goal for this week was networking/multiplayer/AI, and it's reasonable to say that I accomplished that. There's a lot that I'd like to polish up still, and there's still a good chunk of hours left to do that. All-in-all, I'd say I'm quite pleased that I've been able to stick to the original schedule as well as I have, and that now have a multiplayer networked game of my own creation!

Lines of Code

Total: 5939
New: 72

New Achievements:

None.

Pretty Pictures

I'm skipping the pretty pictures today again. I didn't get that much done, and my program is currently in a state where it doesn't really run because of a bug. So I can't even really take screenshots, and if I did, there'd be little to look at.

Accomplishments

• I got attacks and upgrades to be serialized and sent across the network. That means now the full game state is being sent across the network!
• I started working on letting updates happen, starting with AI player movements, but that's giving me strange serialization errors that I wasn't able to even begin to diagnose, because my debugger didn't seem to be working correctly. Hopefully it works tomorrow. I'm rebooting my computer…

I've got a clear weekend ahead of me, but I'm uncertain if it's going to be enough to resolve all of the networking problems that could potentially come up. Networking is a notoriously tough area to play in.

Lines of Code

Total: 5867
New: 80

New Achievements:

None tonight.

Pretty Pictures

Accomplishments

• I got Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition installed, plus XNA, plus a few other add-ons (NCrunch, VisualHG, a spell checker).
• I got ships to serialize across the network, but not any upgrades.
• I got the game to work with multiple clients, though there's nothing the clients can do yet because input doesn't get sent back to the server. But my picture above is proof that you can connect two clients to the server!

Still plenty more to do with networking. I've come a long way during the week, considering that I don't get nearly as much time to work on things, but I still have my work cut out for me for the upcoming weekend.

I've got to say, this is coming along great! It's obviously still in the early phases (I think a good UI could do a lot to make it appear more complete, but don't feel rushed about this), but you've got the base gameplay done, and it's pretty fun. Rotating ships can be frustrating still, especially now that every move counts, but the game has definitely got a nice flow to it already.

Keep up the good work, RB!

Lines of Code

Total: 5787
New: 316

New Achievements:

None that I'm aware of right now, though I deserve a second copy of that Law of Live Demos achievement. I went to show my wife what I had done and as I was carrying my laptop into the other room, my screen went black, never to return (until I rebooted).

Pretty Pictures

No… this isn't a step backwards, I promise!

Accomplishments

• Lots of moving files around. I created my new projects yesterday, but didn't move the files to where they needed to be. So that was the first thing today.
• Created a new download and replaced the old download with it. Hopefully it works, because now I've started doing things that break the previous state to enable networking. If something's wrong with that download, I'll need to go back and update to an old version to make the changes. (But thank goodness for source control, or that would be impossible.)
• Got started with networking. While I've got a long way to go still, I was able to get the game board sent across the network, as evidenced by the Pretty Pictures section!
• There's a ton more that needs to be sent, but I feel pretty good about the architecture I've built for sending data across the network.

There's still plenty more to do with networking. But it's coming along!

This should fix the hardcoded path that I had forgotten about in there. Hopefully this one works. I'm about to pull apart some things to make client/server, so if it doesn't work for people, it will be harder to go back to an earlier revision to make a new download.

Lines of Code

Total: 5470
New: 244

New Achievements:

• ½KLOC: Your game reaches 500 lines of code. You're off to a great start! (This is after I changed the official achievements to include a 500 line version and got rid of the 100K one.)
• 2KLOC: Your game reaches 2000 lines of source code. Keep it up! (This is after I changed the official achievements to include the 2K version, and ditched the 50K one.)
• Law of Live Demos: You show your WIP to somebody. Something goes horribly wrong. (I'm claiming this one because my download from yesterday is apparently broken because I had a hardcoded path. It won't work anywhere but on my computer. You guys should come over and play it!)

Pretty Pictures

Skipping the pretty pictures again today….

Accomplishments

• I got several bugs cleaned up in the AI. It actually works pretty smoothly now, though it's clear there's no intelligence to it. It's just random moves.
• I did a bunch of work in win/loss conditions. It's almost there, which would mean you could both win and lose the game (and I'd unlock the achievements for it, too!).
• Massive refactoring in the way that the game round is generated. I've pulled all of that out of the constructor of the GameRound class and into a IGameRoundGenerator interface and a corresponding RandomGameGenerator class. There is now much better separation between setting up a round and the mechanics of actually playing a round. This also keeps the door open for alternative game round generators, including ones that are based on a specific scenario or campaign instead of random generation.
• I fixed the bug that made the download not function at all, but I failed to put up a new download today. So… that will have to happen tomorrow.
• Some beginning work on making the game run in a client/server architecture. (But don't worry, it should still also run without a server. At least by the end of the month.)

So things do keep progressing, but there is still a ton more to do. Networking and AI was the goal for this week, and that's definitely not ruled out yet!

Hope this helps!

Lines of Code

Total: 5226
New: 346

New Achievements:

• 5KLOC: Your program reaches 5000 lines of code. (I need to rework those achievements. the 50K and 100K is going to be out of reach for everybody, and I think it is worth adding in some smaller ones in their place. Suggestions? 250? 500? Maybe some between the others we already have?)

Pretty Pictures

I'm skipping the pretty pictures for today. There's nothing that I did that is visually interesting. In fact, all this week might be the same. So pretty pictures are unfortunately on hold for the next little bit. But expect it to come back next week, when I'll be focusing on UI.

Accomplishments

• I got everything else that I wanted serialized to a file. So you can now define your own ship classes, your own weapons and other ship upgrades, and your own game settings from the file.
• I got a download ready to go. (That's #2 of my 5 download commitment.)
• I got started on multiplayer and AI. There's now an AI player that's really dumb. But he's going to move all the same ships as you, so you better move fast! Eventually, players will only be able to move ships that belong to them, but that hasn't been implemented yet.

Download #2

Here's the link for the latest download: psb/PSB-Release2.zip

Hm. That's getting larger. I might need a different solution for uploading these files, rather than use up all my Wikidot space.

A lot has been added since the last download a week ago. The UI (heck, the entire UX) is kinda sucky though. That's the focus next week, not this last week. But I'm definitely open to suggestions. (I've still got Marcus's thoughts on rotating ships in my mind. It definitely needs to be cleaned up.)

I also had a bunch of other things going my way yesterday too.

For one, I think I got at least 12 hours of programming in. It's easier to get code written if you have plenty of time.

Two, most of those lines came from the write-to-file/read-from-file feature. I've done enough with files that I know what I'm doing, and I didn't have to sit there trying to figure out how to structure things or what the best way to approach things were. Just piling up the lines of code. In fact, there were plenty of times yesterday early on where I spent a lot of time and ran my LOC counter only to be disappointed that I had only added 5 or 20 lines of new code. Probably 600 of those were from the file stuff.

Adding on to that, I ended up creating quite a few small code files (data transfer objects). These had similar properties as the classes in my game state, so they were easy to design, plus they're small, and I was able to pick up all of the "clutter" that comes with a new C# file (using directives, namespace declaration, a pile of curly braces).

And of course, a lot of it comes down to what counts as a line of code. Do blank lines count? Do comments count? Do lines that contain nothing but an opening or closing curly brace count? Depending on who you ask, you'll get different answers for all of those. For what it's worth, I'm not counting blank lines or comment lines, but the single curly braces do count. I'm also counting not just *.cs files, but *.fx (shader files) and .yaml (configuration files) as well. There might be other types of files that I'd include, but I haven't ran into them yet.

It also helps that I have essentially unilateral control over what I'm building, and I'm an expert in the codebase because I wrote it all. If you're working with others, or working in areas that you didn't create or that have been lost to your memory, or working on refactoring and bug fixing instead of adding new features, things would be very different.

Let me point out a comparison that I think you'll find enlightening.

At the end of the day at work today, knowing that the two of you had left comments, I went back over the revisions I committed at work today. I counted lines added, lines deleted, and lines modified. I added 9 lines, modified 9 lines, and deleted 2. A grand total of 20 lines that I touched in an entire day of work.

Those two figures probably represent extremes. 900 LOC is a ton, even for me. And 20 seems insanely unimpressive. I don't know for sure, but I'd bet that's way lower than a typical day at work.

It reminds me of a story I heard about a company who had a horrible bug in their code and couldn't get it fixed. They brought in a consultant and paid him big bucks. He spent a full day studying the code and nearing the end of the day, he made one change to one line of code, and the thing worked like it was supposed to. Upon telling the people who hired him what the fix was, they started to complain. "We're not going to pay you all that money for only one line of code!" He responded by saying, "Oh, I'm only charging you 5 cents for the change. I'm charging you the rest for knowing which line to change!"

Another story, while we're telling stories about lines of code. Once upon a time, a large corporation decided that the way to motivate programmers would be to give them a bonus for every line of code they wrote. The developers didn't like that. The company's best programmer made some changes to the code, cleaning some things up dramatically. He then submitted -6000 lines of code written for the week, and management got the picture and rescinded it….

I suppose a lot of it has to do with 3d math and matrix.. backing code you need to do the neat stuff RB is pulling off.

Lines of Code

Total: 4858
New: 940

New Achievements:

• 50 Hours: You spend at least 50 hours programming your game during the month. (I've been tracking my time in KanbanFlow, so this is pretty easy to figure out: 55 hours and counting.
• Applying Research: Spend at least an hour programming when you should be doing something else. (I should have gone to bed an hour ago, yet here I am!)
• Way to Brag: You claim at least 15 achievements. (And proud of it!)

Pretty Pictures

Accomplishments

Today mostly makes up for yesterday, but not quite.

I have a schedule that I've been hoping to stick to, and I'm now only just barely behind it. I had intended on getting all of the core functionality up and running during the first week, which is now coming to a close. I got most of it done, with a couple of small exceptions.

My major accomplishments for the day are these:

• You can now choose which attacks you want to use.
• And for the attacks that are limited, you expend them and can't use them anymore.
• You can now add upgrades to a ship that give it different engine ratings and allow you to modify the standard dice that you roll (for your primary attack or for defense).
• I made it so that if you've used up all your moves, but you can still attack, a red sword icon appears above the ship, instead of the movement icon.
• Made it so that on the left side, you can see the selected ship, while on the right side, you can see the ship you're hovering over. This makes it easier to see the status of ships without having to select them first. (Which is really nice when deciding which ship to attack.)
• Made it so that ship classes are determined through a set of YAML files instead of embedded in the code. This means… YOU GET TO DEFINE YOUR OWN SHIP CLASSES! I did the same thing for weapons, but not other upgrades. Yet. Want proof? Look back at that image. I've defined a Lego Man ship class and a Cluster Bombs upgrade!

I wanted to put out another release today, but I think I'm going to wait until tomorrow, after I get done with making the other upgrades come out of a file. If that goes beyond a full day, I'll be in serious danger of falling behind, so let's hope I can knock that out tomorrow by the end of the day.

The official plans for the upcoming week is to bring multiplayer into the mix, both in terms of AI and networked play. That's a massive amount of work, but I don't think it's impossible. (I'm more worried about next week, where I'll get into the UI stuff more.)

Lines of Code

Total: 3918
New: 319

New Achievements:

I still need to look over the list again, but it's late, so I'm going to skip it for now.

Pretty Pictures

Accomplishments

For a Saturday, my progress was actually kind of disappointing. But I probably shouldn't complain too much. Things are still coming along pretty well.

The bulk of my day today was in doing work for upgrades. In particular, weapon upgrades that give you a special weapon you can use instead of the standard attack.

The system is pretty flexible. Just about any weapon could be created, but the "core game" will only have a few specific weapons. Right now, I've got all destroyers upgraded with Guided Missiles and all battleships upgraded with Plasma Beams. You can see both of those in the image above. (It's not that cool to look at right now. It just lets you attack targets that aren't immediately adjacent to you.)

The Guided Missiles upgrade allows you to hit targets at a range of 2 and 3 (not 1) with 2 standard dice, while the Plasma Beam lets you hit ships directly in front of you at range 1, 2, 3, and 4, using 5 standard dice. Both of these are intended to eventually be limited use. (Not all upgrade weapons will be that way, but these two should be.)

You can also see on the left side in red the attacks that a ship has available to it, though you can't pick your attack yet.

So there's plenty more to do with upgrades tomorrow, and to meet my goals, I was also hoping to get some file loading for the different ship types in this week as well. It's possible that all of that could still happen, though I'm not so sure at the moment…

Lines of Code

Total: 3599
New: 143

New Achievements:

None that I'm ready to claim immediately, though I should probably run through the art ones again.

Pretty Pictures

Accomplishments

I didn't get started doing development until a bit later in the day, and PiscesMike and I talked code design for a while (I'm really liking Google Docs for stuff like that!), but I was still able to make a bit of progress.

My work today was in the part of the code that I've been calling the Activation System. When a new turn starts, something has to decide which ships get to move next. Up until now, that has been done by picking 5 ships randomly, of any team.

The way it was intended is quite different from that, though. Each player should be able to submit a set of cards to a community pile. Those cards are shuffled together and one is drawn at a time. The card determines who gets to move, but in general, it is by team and ship class. So the red team's battleships will all get a chance, or the blue team's light frigates, or whatever.

While the game does not yet allow you to choose the cards you put in the pile, the basic system now works, drawing from a set of cards that has 5 for each team, with one being for each of the 5 ship classes available at the moment.

In addition, as you can see in the image above, in the top right corner is the title of the current card. I worked a little later than I originally intended to so that I could get that information surfaced in the UI, just to have something to show for my efforts today… :D

I still feel like I'm pretty well on track to getting the core game mechanics hammered out this weekend, which feels pretty good. I'm also pretty pleased that my current game architecture has proven to be pretty flexible; as changes have been needed, it has been very easy to make them. Software development isn't always that way, and there's no promises that it will stay that way on this game in the future, but it still feels pretty good! (Now I've jinxed myself…)

Anyways, I'm looking forward to another download, whenever you think that you've made enough progress to warrant one.

Lines of Code

Total: 3456
New: 165

New Achievements:

I don't think I got any new ones, this time around. There are a few I'm getting close to…

Pretty Pictures

Accomplishments

We're now 20% of the way through the competition (perhaps more, if you count the 31st, though I didn't get started until the next day). I feel like things are coming along pretty well in general, but my pace seems to have slowed down somewhat in the last couple of days. I don't know if it actually has, but sometimes that mental perception of momentum loss is enough to cause actual momentum loss.

Yesterday, I wrote about how I had gotten started on different ship classes. Today, I brought that to a much higher level of completion. If you look at the image above, you'll see that I've got 5 different ship classes. These models aren't my final models (well… they might be, but they're not intended to be) but it's enough to see the variety. The largest ones, the Battleships that Blue has two of in the front, are beasts. They tend to one-attack kill the small guys, which is kind of what I wanted. Of course, right now all ships have an equal probability of being generated, which won't hold later on.

The other thing I did was fix a few bugs that I discovered. I suppose it's generally better to focus on and eliminate bugs as early as possible so that you have a clean, stable application. So I think I made the right choice in prioritizing those bugs at that level.

Lines of Code

Total: 3291
New: 253

New Achievements:

None that I'm aware of today…

Pretty Pictures

Accomplishments

I didn't get much done today that you can really see. I've made some good progress on different ship types, but none of that has surfaced to the UI really. So since there's not much to see, my pretty pictures for the day basically drop in a different ship type as a replacement for the previous one. (It's nothing fancy. I just loaded a different model.)

It will probably take me all day tomorrow to get to the point where that's working well, or maybe even Friday.

I also did some work on a 3D particle engine, but again, none of that surfaced up to the top yet, so you'll just have to wait a bit to actually see it.

I also talked with Swat about a component that he's going to be making, which is some networking code for a chat feature. Hopefully, it will help us learn the right important lessons so that we can do things right next week when networking comes up…

Basically, in any given turn, a card is drawn from a pile that determines which ships get activated. These will always be on the same team, but depending on how you've spent your points, the luck of the draw, and what ships are still surviving, you're not guaranteed to get an equal number of turns. There will be a relatively short time limit (maybe 1 minute?) on each draw, so the game doesn't lag too bad if you don't get a turn right away.

The ships that are activated then get a chance to take a turn. When a ship is activated, it will get all of its engine power (indicated by the three circles at the top) that allow it to either move one space forward, turn 60 degrees to face the next direction, or combo points, which can be used for either.

The ship will also get a certain number of attacks allocated to it, though with very few exceptions, this will be 1 attack per turn. (For this month, I don't think there will be any exceptions to that.)

Once you make any attack, you currently give up all movement, so you must make any moves that you want before attacking.

But that's on a ship-by-ship basis, so you can move one ship and attack with it, then move the next, etc.

Once all ships have used all of their moves and attacks, or if the player opts to end their turn early, the turn ends and another turn starts.

Of course all of that is only half implemented right now, but I'm moving quickly in that direction… Hopefully the core concepts are working by the end of this upcoming weekend (Day 10) so I can move on to networking and UI.

Lines of Code

Total: 3038
New: 286

New Achievements:

Only one new achievement:

• 3KLOC: I crossed the 3K mark for lines of code.

Pretty Pictures

Accomplishments

The real accomplishment of the day was getting combat up and running. You can now attack ships by clicking on them. The die rolling that I wanted to use is already working, though there are no UI clues that it is happening. Yet. But ships can take damage and be destroyed!

You can see in the image above that the game will mark the ships you can attack with a pulsing red hexagon (I've currently got 3 teams). Also, once you attack, you're done moving…

I'm not sure what I'll be working on tomorrow, at this point, but I'll probably continue fleshing out the core game mechanics by either starting to add in different ship types or upgrades.

Lines of Code

Total: 2752
New: 195

New Achievements:

The only achievement I got today is one I just barely invented and added to the list. Feel free to invent your own as well, if you do something that you feel is worthy of merit. (Just post it in the official Achievements thread so we can all claim it too!)

• Less is S'more: Lines of code ain't everything. Sometimes, the best solution is to refactor to eliminate redundant lines of code, leaving you with less but better designed code. Do this and unlock this achievement.

I'm also getting quite close to that next Lines of Code achievement at 3K. Maybe tomorrow.

Pretty Pictures

Accomplishments

Looking back over my commit history, here are the big things that I got accomplished (mostly small things and tweaks):

• Did some usability testing (thanks to my wife) and found I have some problems with my UI…
• Made it so you can't zoom out so far.
• I made it so each hex that the selected ship can move to is marked with a little flashing green hex, as shown in the pictures above. It's cool because it's animated. It starts out small and grows larger, fading from lime green out to completely transparent. The best part is, my animation system was a piece of cake to extend to allow this, which means it's probably designed pretty well.
• Made it so that you can double-click on hexes and move the camera to focus on that hex. The camera is no longer stuck in the middle of the world.
• Some very small things done behind the scenes towards enabling combat, but nothing to show for it yet. Maybe tomorrow…

Lines of Code

Total: 2557
New: 893

New Achievements:

• The Great Unveiling: Provide a download for your game. (In a second…)
• Prototype: You have something that could loosely be called a working game by the end of the first weekend. (It's a stretch, because there's no explosions and no winning or losing. But I feel like it isn't too much of a stretch because there's enough there to give the flavor of the game. Besides, I felt like I needed another achievement for the amount of work I did today.)

Pretty Pictures

Accomplishments

Looking back over my commit history, here are the big things that I got accomplished:

• Got conversion from Cartesian coordinates to Hex coordinates implemented.
• Made it so you could select ships.
• Made the base of each ship colored according to team colors. Also, there's now more than one team, though lucky you, you get to control them all!
• Made it so you could move ships forward (1 cell).
• Made it so you could rotate a selected ship by clicking on it (again) and dragging to the right or left to cause the rotation.
• Made it so ships were limited in how far they could move or rotate before running out of power.
• Made it so that when you use up all of the energy in your ships, new ones are activated as a part of the next turn. (This will be refined substantially over the coming week.)
• There's now a crappy UI that shows you how much engine power you have left for forward movement (thrust) turning movement (maneuvering) and combo (which can be used for turning or moving forward).
• Ships currently generate with different amounts of thrust, maneuvering, and combo engine points, to give a little bit of flavor to the game.
• When all ships have used up their energy, the game automatically advances to the next turn by randomly activating more ships.
• Added a button that lets you skip the rest of your moves, which is really helpful if you get a ship in a spot where it doesn't have any legal moves (or is where you want it) but still has moves left. You can now end your turn without exhausting all options.
• Created a download!

Here's the link to the download: psb/PSB-Release1.zip

• Select ships by clicking on them (technically, the square under them).
• Move ships by clicking on the space in front of them.
• Rotate ships by clicking and dragging to the left or right.
• When you run out of moves (shown by the three icons on the top left) you won't be able to move the ship any further.
• Movement comes in three types of points: Thrust (the middle one) which indicates forward (only) movement, Maneuvering (the right one) which indicates turning (only) movement, and Combo (the left one) which indicates energy that can be used for either a rotation or a move forward.
• Skip the rest of your turn by hitting the End Turn button.

Also, if you get a chance to download the game, I'd love it if you could give me some feedback.

I'm interested in any feedback you've got, but one thing in particular that I'd like to get some feedback on is the style of the little icons above the ships when they're active and can move. There are three different styles that I programmed, and you can view them all by pressing the ‘1`, `2`, and `3` keys. One has them spinning in circles, one uses normal billboarding so that the object is always facing the camera, and the last uses constrained billboarding, so that it is always facing the camera, but it only spins in a circle instead of a sphere (it won’t rotate up if you look at it from above).

I have a preference for one, but I'd like to know what others think.

And now we enter the workweek, where things get significantly harder to get time to work on the game. In past competitions, it has always been the work week that has been my eventual downfall. Let's take them one at a time… here's to getting through the first workweek!

Lines of Code

Total: 1664
New: Somewhat less than that. I pulled in a bit of code that I did on Wednesday and Thursday.

New Achievements:

• 1KLOC: Your game reaches 1000 lines of code.
• It's Just Temporary: You put in artwork in your game that you claim is temporary, until you or your friend can provide you with better art. (I've got several ship models that I want to pull out later on.)
• Time Machine: Worked for over an hour on code that you rip out later that day. (I tried to make the camera animate between positions, but some bugs were hanging me up, and I decided it was lower priority and there were better things to do, so I went back to my old camera.)
• Moral Support: Leave a comment on somebody else's game thread with (constructive) feedback.
• You Got Tropes: Use at least three tropes of the game chosen as the theme. (I listed these a couple of days ago.)
• Are We On? - Join the live chat. (I've been there all day!)
• George: Ask RB too many questions. (And you guys thought you had a monopoly this this one… I ask myself really dumb questions all the time!)
• It's Just Math, How Hard Can It Be?: (This one doesn't have much of a description, but I'ma go ahead and claim it. I spent about three hours today working through math dealing with hexagonal coordinate systems and their conversion to Cartesian, which I thought would be simple, but turned out to be a massive pain in the butt.)
• Competitive: This is your second competiton on RB's site.
• Experienced: You've joined 3 competitions or more. (Here or anywhere.)

Pretty Pictures

Accomplishments

Looking back over my commit history, here are the big things that I got accomplished:

• Some work on the core data model classes, like GameObject, Ship, Board, GameRound, etc.
• Stole my own skybox stuff from another game I made.
• Stole some line rendering code from another game I made and made some enhancements to draw polygons.
• Got the board drawing, with "exit points" in purple. These are off the board, and moving here causes the ship to leave the field of battle, never to return (hyperspace to safety, and what-not).
• Got ships drawing, including the 3D models and their bases (this is part of the artistic style I'm going for, which is to make the game look and feel like a board game, hence the "Plastic" in "Plastic Space Battles!".
• A bunch of work on cameras and controlling them.
• A bunch of work on my hexagonal coordinate system and conversion to Cartesian.
• A bunch of unit tests, spending the most time on tests for that last point.
• Pulled in some code for generating a ray in 3D space from a mouse click, which will be used in selection.
• Some work on getting full screen and variable screen resolutions up and running and working correctly.

Overall, it's been a pretty productive day. I've probably spent at least 12 hours programming, and kind of lost track of time.

But on the other hand, in other competitions, I've had the goal of having a prototype by the end of the first weekend, and I'm just not sure that's possible with this game. I might focus on bringing some more functionality into the game tomorrow, and if so, it might still be possible, but I wouldn't plan on it at this point.

On the other hand, I feel like (more so than my previous games) I'm building a solid base to grow from. So even if it takes longer to get that first playable prototype, I think I may actually be better off in the long run.

Or I could just be trying to make way too big of a game… :D

So many weapons, so many enemies

Offer various choices for weapons. In Castlevania, normally you will have the primary weapon (whip) and a secondary weapon which can be used once you gather hearts. The secondary weapons have generally been: holy water, throwing knife, throwing ax, throwing sword, and crosses. Each will have different effects, and some are more potent than others for certain enemies.

(Though I'll definitely be using different weapons than Castlevania…)

Camera Centering

The game's point of view moves to follow the player's character, ship, avatar, or representation as they move around in the world.

It won't be exclusively this, but you'll probably be able to "lock on" to a ship, and the camera will follow it as it moves.

You Require More Vespene Gas

The player must deal with completing the game or level with limited resources (excluding time).

Depending on how far I get… the game will have a finite amount of resources, both in terms of the number of points you have to build your fleet, and in terms of limited weapons that run out during the game.

My day was mostly working on my UI framework, and I still have the goal of being able to create real instances of my mockup within my UI library. It's a stretch at this point, but it's still possible. I've only got two days left…

Here's what I did today:

• Panels can now be placed anywhere on the screen.
• Panels now have padding.
• Fixed some bugs in the stack panel layout.
• Got a good start on Grids, which I realized I probably still need (to put multiple controls in the same place at the same time).

Here's what I think I need to accomplish my goal by Thursday night:

• Finish Grids.
• Some sort of PictureBox control.
• Make sure that you can nest panels (this might already be done, but I need to confirm).
• Probably some sort of ListView. WPF's ListView controls are incredibly powerful, and hopefully I can create something that fits the bill in time.

In somewhat related news, I won't be around Friday. I'm planning a bit of a Halloween party and playing some board games. So unfortunately, I won't be starting the competition on Day 1. I'll only have 30 days, and the rest of you will get a 1-day head start!

My goal is to be able to replicate the cards in the above mockups before the competition starts, but that really only gives me three days now, after today. So time is definitely tight. Of course, whatever I don't finish before the competition can be worked on during the competition, but I think I'd feel better if I was to that point in my UI framework.

Anyway, my first step today was to jump over to WPF and see how I might implement it over there. After all, my UI is pretty WPF inspired. I thought I'd be using a grid for layouts, but I quickly discovered that stack panels made more sense. Which is good. The logic for stack panels is pretty simple compared to grids.

The idea with a stack panel is that you take controls and drop them in there. The panel will arrange them either vertically in a row or horizontally in a row, giving each control the space they want in that direction. In the other direction, they're constrained by the size of the parent stack panel's size, but more often than not, the child controls are smaller anyway. So you have to figure out whether it should be aligned to the left, the right, the center, or stretched across the whole parent.

Anyway, that's what I've been working on today is my own StackPanel container. And it's actually working pretty well now, as shown in the image below:

What you see there is about 30 rectangle "controls" (placeholders I made to test things like this out) that each have their own margin (I think it's 3 px in each direction) with random sizes and colors. The StackPanel is set up to be oriented horizontally, but it works just as well to make it vertically oriented. They're set up with a VerticalAlignment of Center, which you can see, and a HorizontalAlignment of Left, which you can't see because it's oriented horizontally. But it works, I swear!

There are two rather important things that still need to be done to make this complete.

The first is that the panel as a whole is stuck in the top corner of the window. You can't put a panel anywhere but there right now.

The second is that you can't nest panels. Being able to have panels that contain panels is what will make a small set of layouts and containers cover just about every imaginable scenario, so that's rather important.

So that's what I'll be working on tomorrow.

If I can get that done, plus maybe a PictureBox control of some sort (for just showing a single image) I will be able to have my UI framework where I wanted it by Friday. That actually sounds kind of reasonable at the moment.

yes, the randomly sized and colored rectangles look kind of Dr. Seuss-ish. Or as Pisces Mike would say, "Hippy Disco". You know, to match that one song…

I was planning on working on my UI framework today, but I got busy doing design document work. (It's odd, but I'm actually having fun writing the design document. Perhaps its because I mix it up with mockups and small code prototypes, rather than one giant, long writing session.)

Speaking of which, I've made some interesting progress on certain aspects of the game's design that are worth showing off. Keep in mind that the ships in the picture are shamelessly stolen from the Internet, and they won't be what's actually used in the game. They're just samples of what might be.

Also, a bit of a description of what it all means follows the images as well. But I know you're only here for the shiny stuff, so that first!

These cards should give you not only a hint of the visual style I'm gunning for, but also how some of the game mechanics are expected to work.

Each ship card will show a picture of the ship that it corresponds to. Right now, I'm just using some images for some 3D models that I may or may not purchase (they're actually kind of expensive). Ultimately, in the game, I'm thinking that this will actually be a drawing of the ship rendered to a render target then redrawn as a sprite, so that it shows things that are actually happening to your ship (damage effects, etc.). This will give the cards a sort of "live" feel to them, like the images in Harry Potter. (Try to do that with a physical board game!)

Below that is the ship's name. Each ship will be given a unique name, and that's displayed here, with a background that matches the team's color. (Get your cards to do that, too!)

You can see that I've got a red team and a green team here, with the red team having one destroyer and the green team having two frigates. (Ah crap! The text says "Destroyer"! They're frigates, gosh darn it! I'll have to fix that later….)

Speaking of that, below the ship's name is its class and designation.

There are certain pre-made ship classes that will exist in the game. They'll outline basic ship capabilities, plus the upgrade types that are available for it. Two ships of the same class will generally appear the same, and you can see that the two green frigates are both Black Fire class frigates.

One way that the game will be expandable is by adding in additional ship classes to use as your starting point.

I don't think the player will be able to design their own ship classes from the ground up. I don't know if that will really be possible, based on the higher priority need of good game balancing (to avoid "pay to win" scenarios). But perhaps the tools will be accessible, and you'll be able to design your own classes for use between you and your friends or something. We'll see.

Below the ship class is a row that contains the ship's total life/health/strength, and the ship's engine rating.

As I mentioned in the earlier document, most ships will have a total strength of 3, with more powerful ships not getting more strength, just protecting them better. All three of these ships follow that pattern, and stick with the standard 3 hits. But this leaves open the option for some variation in this regard.

A ship's engine rating comes in three parts (two of which are shown here). The first is a set of points that can be used for either moving forward or turning 60 degrees to either side. (To the next direction in a hexagonal grid that the game will be played on.) The baseline engine rating is 2 points of this type, allowing you to either move two spaces forward, turn twice (so you're almost facing behind you), or turn once and move once.

Sometimes, ship classes or ship upgrades will provide you with additional movement. Sometimes, this is in an extra point or two of this same type of movement (turn or move) while other times, it's limited to just turning, or just moving. For these cases, this movement shows up a little differently, as shown on the Sword of Ares card. The Sword of Ares has the normal 2 movements, plus an extra rotation, making it extra maneuverable (but not extra fast). The other two ships simply have the base movement.

The next row down is the Upgrades Bar. This bar indicates which upgrades this type of ship can include. As it turns out, all three of these ships could add on a Missile Upgrade, as indicated by the missile icon, while the Sword of Ares also has another available upgrade: the Shield Upgrade.

The grayed out upgrades are currently being unused. It isn't always wise to fully upgrade your ships. Upgrades, like the ships themselves, cost points to include in your fleet. Sometimes, depending on the location and your general play style, it may be better to have more ships that have fewer upgrades. So you can see that the Sword of Ares as well as the Styx have both chosen to forego an upgrade.

While the specific upgrades are not shown here, it is easy to imagine that the Acheron and the Sword of Ares have used their Missile Upgrades on different upgrade types, because their cards don't really show the same effects. Perhaps the Acheron has upgraded with the Rail Gun Upgrade (which we'll say has the Missile Upgrade Type) that has converted one of its standard dice into a red Attack die, giving it much higher odds of rolling Hits (and giving up the Shields). The Sword of Ares has potentially elected to upgrade with the Long Range Missile upgrade, which is a secondary weapon that allows it to hit targets farther away than usual, without modifying its standard dice roll.

On the bottom row is the dice that the ship rolls on a standard roll. You can see from the red die on the Acheron that this already accounts for ship upgrades that are in place that modify its standard roll, because it has a red Attack die instead of another blue Standard die.

Not shown here is the dice that are rolled for a secondary weapon. That would be shown on the secondary weapon card, and only used when the player elects to use their secondary attack instead of their primary one. Secondary weapons are usually more powerful, but usually limited in number of usages.

Finally, down in the bottom right corner is a little icon that indicates which set the ship/card came from. This is another nod to the board game universe, where this is incredibly common in games that have expansions.

Just to reiterate, the intention here is that you might pay money for each new expansion, and while you might pay to have more variety, I really want to avoid any sort of "pay to win" problems with this game.

Having done this much of the design upfront now, I'm getting quite nervous about the abilities of my current UI framework. It's going to need some serious work to make it capable of dynamically drawing cards like these. So my goal in the few days left leading up to the competition (and keep in mind I only have a couple of hours each evening) is to expand my UI framework to draw these cards.

And once again, I think I'm starting to see how overly ambitious I've been. This is an insane amount of work, and I'm both excited and terrified about what lies in front of me in the month of November.

I might have to take some time off from work for this….

But I have a counter offer! I will be doing my bachelor project, either this spring or late summer next year. You could make a request via your company that I would be doing my BA in collaboration with you. If it gets approved I would effectively have ~2 months of full time to work on it.

I don't necessarily expect to finish every item in my feature list. Strike that. I know I won't finish all of those. But hopefully I can finish a set of core features that leaves people with something worth playing still!

In many ways, this reminds me of the last competition where I spent some time in advance working on a GUI framework. I'm kind of repeating myself here. But on the bright side, this edition of the framework is significantly more powerful and flexible than the last round. I attribute that entirely to learning WPF, which has some great ideas regarding control templates to change the appearance of controls, and some other things.

In the evening, I've been working on some data binding code. In theory, you'll be able to tie your UI to objects that will automatically get updated (in either or both directions) as things change. Won't it be nice to have your UI automatically update the second you change the underlying objects!

It still has a long way to go. I can't imagine it's truly useful for anyone yet, even me. But this does give me a head start on development without breaking the official rules. (Not that that would matter much anyway…)

I was planning on doing some more UI work tomorrow, and then spending the week leading up to the competition fleshing out my idea more, along with work in my design document.

Anyways, I would like to help with anything that I can, even if it's just providing some of my own very mediocre artwork, but I've been super busy lately, and it'll probably be all I can do to get my own game done, whatever that's going to end up being - sorry.

Definitely go for it, though, you've really got a great idea.

This is effectively a shortened version of the Functional Design Document, which I'm also working on.

I'm open to suggestions and questions on the behavior of the game. Quite honestly, there's a lot that I'm just not sure how it will work. I really think I need something working before I can know what works and what doesn't work.

Once again, I'm still open to having some team mates, though that window of opportunity is closing soon. I'd prefer to know in advance who will be joining me, so we can get on the same page with respect to development tools and such, as well as start planning. The competition starts in only 5 or 6 days, depending on where you live in the world, which means there isn't much time left.

I won't commit to daily updates or anything like that (which I've done in the past). I just don't know how things are going to go.

What I will commit to is at least 5 downloadable updates, hopefully mostly on Sunday nights, starting at the end of the first weekend.

I've been pretty busy doing some design work, and I actually made some pretty significant changes to what I want to build to try to bring the scope a little more under control.

I'm still open to team mates if people are interested, though I know it would probably be helpful for me to post some more details on the game. I'd love to find an artist to work with me, but if I don't get one, I've already decided that I won't stress about the art side too much, and just focus on making a game that functions well. (The art has been my downfall in the past…)

I'm hoping to post a "2-page sales pitch" in this thread soon (tomorrow?). Hopefully that will give people a better idea on what the game I'm trying to make is. (And hopefully it will clarify things for me as well.)

Aside from that, I'm hoping to spend a good part of the weekend doing some UI framework development. I think I might stream some of it live on Twitch, in case you're interested in that…