Revenge wins the vote

As I suspected, my action oriented version of Coffee Quest -- which is called Coffee Quest Revenge -- has won the vote. This is a fairly large project which is partially the reason that the vote was for the 0.1.0 version. This point may confuse some people not use to the various ways of indicating versions (and there are many different ways, not a single standardized way which makes the issue more confusing). The first number in a version is the major release. The 0 indicates that this is not the finished game. The second number is the minor version, which when not zero indicates a minor revision has been released. It is common, at least in the open source community, to have a zero release with the minor release being the number of the release. This means that the 1 means that this will be the first playable release of the game. The game will not be fully complete (because if it was, this would be a 1.0 release) but will be fully playable.

That being said, to speed up the development of the first release of CQR, I was thinking that I would do the game up in the 2D automap mode so the game would be a playable 2D top down view of the game. This would greatly speed up the first release because if I had to do the full 3D version it would take significantly longer to finish the first playable release. What I am eventually hoping to do is to take advantage of the PaperVision 3D engine, but don't want to use it in my projects until it is out of private beta. Another option for the 3D engine would be to write a ray casting engine. This would not be as fast as using papervision due to various factors that I don't want to get into today.

The third choice in the poll would to be a hybrid approach. The game would be rendered using the techniques in the various 3D One of those Weeks episodes, which means the 3D view would be step based. The movement on the automap, however, would be the actual free-scrolling movement. This would allow for the game to be played in a chunky 3D like view, but the game mechanics would be implementing the 360 degrees of movement that the final version of the 3D rendering would support. The advantage of this is that it wouldn't add too much time to the development while giving you some of the 3D eye candy.

Of course, the poll covering this issue is going to run the rest of this month on the Blazing Games website, so be sure to vote if you haven't already.