Oh my word there is so much to do!

For some reason I've decided this five minutes is better spent blogging than working, perhaps to take a break. Whatever the reason my conscience is telling me its a bad idea, lilke it does at the moment when I do anything that's not work - the alarm bells sound whenever I make the desicion to take a break, eat, shower, go to the toilet or try to sleep that I should in fact do more work!

Nevertheless, under the stress I'm chugging along with progress. I have now perfected (probably too thoroughly) the methods I'm using to implement the level grapics with all the different hit tests. I'll not bore you with details now, but know that for each placed object and each bounded area of playable level will have had a LOT of work gone into its design and implementation.

Heres a close perspective view of how the level is shaping up:

(click to enlarge)

Progress, but not enough of it!

As I keep ploughing on with this client project, attempting, struggling, worrying, coming back at failed solutions and then solving the seemingly endless procession of problems I face, the excitement and anticipation of seeing how the final game turns out and what other people make of it is half clouded by doubt and potential regret that it wont turn out as good as it could.

I'm finding it an 'interesting' challenge to keep pushing for what could be, as opposed to what I know will be.

This version includes BOT TYPES, (colour-coded display and type counters on the H.U.D.) Also included are PICKUPS which are generated at random times at set spawn points, but won't spawn if point is occupied by a pickup already OR if the man's standing on it. (solved, annoyingly, by two completely different algorithms - code getting messy!)

(click it clever cloggs)

Client Project Update!

I've been busy getting other highly annoying projects and assignments out of the way so I can concentrate on this - now I've been incredibly busy over the last few days as the deadline has now entered the 14 day barrier - which I like to call CRUNCH time!

There's still a hell of a lot to do but I'm confident if I stick to my guns, don't take too long-a-breaks and stay focussed I can produce something to be proud of!

So where am I at? Well I now have the first PLAYABLE version of the game...which admittedly still needs a title. But first things first, what does it now do?

- All the code used is built into CLASSES. (lots of work for little immediate visual effect and irrelevant to non-Flash developers I know, but it was necessary in order to create the bots and allows for more diverse functionality)

- As mentioned in my previous post I have a new CONTROL MECHANISM, which you can play with here (right), and compare it to the old one (left)

- Also mentioned, I now have BOTS, which change to a random direction at random intervals, this may need some tweaking perhaps to weight the new direction chosen away from the player, making it harder to catch said bots, for example

- Both the avatar and bots hit both a boundary at the edge of, and a test object within the the playable area. The bots turn back the opposite way (and sometimes get stuck!) while I've chosen to keep the avatar at the edge of objects and allowing the classic Tomb Raider and other classic game-esque 'running into walls' animation - purely for classic videogame appeal.

- A VERY HARD TO NOTICE feature (because it's just obvious that it should happen) is my depth sorting algorithm which I'm quite proud of :D It consists of not only an array of all the children of the level, but also, because of the way I've contained the various visual elements for level movement, their .y properties had to be converted into global values, so I couldn't just use an array and call a simple sort method. The array had to be created as multidimentional, and then sorted according to a compound argument before the children were issued their new indexes by a 'for loop', cycling through the newly organised array.

Happy days. here, have a fiddle:

(very old) (current)