Sunday, April 29, 2007

Making One of those Weeks 14, part 1

While Modern Melee Combat is now starting to come together into a playable game, there are no guarantees that the game will be finished by Thursday evening. Still, I am now at the point where the code that I have developed can start to be posted to the ultimateretroproject.dev.java.net repository. I don't want to dump a huge chunk of code all at once, so am going to be releasing the code to the repository in a series of logical chunks. I took so long getting to this point because I had a bunch of different parts of the game partially done. I don't like releasing non-functioning code and don't like bothering with branches unless there is a pressing need to do so. While at the moment it looks like there is a really high chance of meeting the Thursday deadline, I am not going to take chances so over the next few days will be writing the next chapter of Making of One of those Weeks Chapter 14. The rough draft will appear in this blog, so the few of you who care about this eBook will get to read it early. This assumes that the people who care about books on game development would read a blog about game development, but my guess is that covers a number of the eBook's readers.

Episode 14 revolves around navigating through a forest. The auto-map feature was not ready at this time, so the player has to deal with mapping themselves. To aid with self-made maps, there is a coordinate displayed on the top of the display. For those of you who do not want to make a map, below is a copy of the map with a path to the ending location in red.


There are actually two separate goals in this episode. The required goal is to reach a point where you can cross the river. The optional goal is to find the cave. The path in the map above only shows the route to the river crossing. The cave is the grey square. It is not too hard to find on your own. Going to the cave adds to the final score for the episode. This cave is very important in future episodes of the game, though is only acknowledged in this episode.

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