Been busy adding a lot of features. I added a level selection screen:



I had a good conversation with a friend of mine and decided that it really is all about maximizing fun and letter people decide their own difficulty. One of the great things about rpg's is if a quest is too hard, you can go do some other quests, level up and then have a better shot as the quest you failed at. Also, isn't it terrible if you've finished a game, want to show someone a level you loved and you can't do it. So to that end I made two decisions. You can always go back and replay old levels. Beating a level the first time will give you 5 points to spend on improving your ship, replaying a level will give you 2 additional points (you can do that 4 more times, for a total of 13 points. You can play more then that,but you don't get any more points after the 5th time). I think that will solve both of these issues, and I don't have to worry about people being blocked by a level.

I added the ability for AI control ships to fire their weapons (which is needed for the tutorial - my test case for now). Finally got to actually use the trigger system (which was nice). And added the ability to add triggers in script (in this case, detecting if the chicago has sucessfully gotten to the marker).

I also did a little bit of ground work for the drones. When the drones are done, the player will be able to do everything they can do in the full game. It will need a bunch of polish, but the full feature set will be there.

Added two new modes to the game. The first is the all-important title-screen. The purpose of this is simply to listen for an a button press so we can determine which controller is in charge for the game. I didn't spend a ton of time on in, but I wanted it to be at least slightly animated, so it just shows the Chicago going past the random asteroid.




The second mode that was added is the levelling system for the game. The player will get 5 points at the end of each mission to spend on one of 10 systems. It should give the player the ability to customize the parts of gameplay that they like the best, and will hopefully provide a bit of replayability to the game.



The only mode left is the save/load mode, which shouldn't be too hard, but I need to figure out how to do the save game (but since the state of the save game is 10 numbers plus the level, it should at least not be too big!). Which means I'll need to figure out the whole who is logged in thing, which I guess has a bunch of edge cases.

I'm not sure if I mentioned this, but I decided that I'm going to submit my game to the Dream Build Play contest this year. The money would be nice, but I really hope it gives the game some publicity and gets it in the coveted "contest finalist" section of the community games. To me that is worth a lot. I think the game will have that rare combination of innovation and polish that very few other community games have. I'm hoping that will lead to a lot of people playing and enjoying it.

Now back to script commands to get the tutorial finished.

Many large systems have been added since my last post. You can see most of these in video below. I added the button interface system for controlling drones and your nanite pods. The drones are next up on the list, you can see two of the nanite pods firing here. The direct damage and the mine creation pod (at the end - the purple particles). I've also had to do a lot to get these systems up and running in an acceptable manner. The particle system needed to be made more flexible so that I could make particles that are more unique per instance.



I also have found out about the deadline for the 2009 Dream, Build, Play. My goal is to get a playable game into the contest by August 6th (the end deadline). I think I'm in pretty good shape to do it. As far as the basic gameplay, I need to some more of the nano-pod effects, which should not be that hard with the framework I've built. And the then I need to add the drones. After that I'll need to make an initial AI for the opponents and then I can have a basic match. That's the one minute experience. Make that as fun as possible and everything else will just be icing on the cake.

Then I'll need to add the leveling system, which should actually be very easy given my framework. That's the one hour experience (combat, leveling, more powerful combat).

Finally, I need to add as many levels as I can before the deadline. I have a pretty good set of tools for level creation, and I've made several improvements over the past few weeks, so while I'm not sure I can get all 20+ levels in, I'm sure I can give the judges a good sampling of levels in the game.

Should be great fun!