Thursday, February 12, 2009

New Week; New Stuff

So here's a little update on what I've been up to for the past week.  First of all, last Friday, we completed our initial design document for our advisor.  Although that's not publicly accessible, it is a 15 page description of the game.  I've spent a number of hours this week revising that and integrating it with our wiki.  Hopefully the wiki will take on the role of the design document more and more as time goes on, so that we can keep a living vision of the game somewhere.

That's going pretty well.  Just for the record, some of the things we've covered in the newest design document (and this will make more sense as we release more details of the game on the blog) include play modes and game settings, organelles, logic, "acts of man", landscape, integrated strategy, the user interface, creating units, the flow of energy, a sample game walkthrough, sound and music, engine, and schedule.  It's pretty rockin'.

In other news, I spent some time re-sketching our main game interface, and making a photoshop mockup.  More or less integrated with this was me making my first ever tiling texture for the agar on the petri dish.  That was a neat experience, but I don't know if I'll be doing all of our textures.  Finally, I put together a preliminary list of every sound we'll need for the game, and then wrote some updated stuff on the flow of energy in the game and creating cells.

That more or less covers it.  As I type this, Andrew's hard at work coding the guts of cell interaction, Roberto is making some sweet icons for organelles, James is creating sprites, and Nik is on a surprise trip to Washington State that he "swears he told at least one of us about".  So things are going well.  Hopefully we will continue to make progress.  I'd really like to get a "world" done by next week, hopefully with some sort of interface that includes a button that can create a sprite cell.  Nothing more than that is necessary for this preliminary checkpoint, but once you have a cell in the world and an interface, it's a very visual, inspiring, and appetizing way to keep spirits and progress up.

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