Cities in the Sky

Well, I’m now graduated! I’m now Ben Hymers MEng, and after being made to wear a ridiculous hat and listen to apocalyptic organ music for several hours, I feel I deserve it. It feels great, but at the same time I’m a little sad; university has been my life for four years and now it’s all over. This also means I’m now unemployed rather than a student (there is a difference!), so any game companies looking for a new recruit, I’m very available!

On to the CITS side of things; the task I set myself in my last post took all of 10 minutes to complete! I was going to make another post about it, but my site curiously disappeared for a day or so. So, there is now a point to the game, though it’s not very hard - you really have to try to lose! I’m going to fiddle a bit with some parameters to get it to be slightly more interesting. But first, I’m going to do a load of tidying up of the internals of the game. My work on Stereoshift increased my knowledge of C++ massively, and as uninteresting as it sounds, I can’t wait to get refactoring my terrible old code What this does mean, though, is that adding new features will take less time - at the moment, there’d be an awful lot of horrible duplicated code were I to add a new type of building, for example.

The next actual feature to be implemented will be the proper breaking of buildings - when something crashes into them or they lean too far, they’ll break off from the island. With a bit of refactoring it should end up much nicer than it has in my previous attempts

First off, apologies for leaving it so long since my last post. I’ve been busy buying lots of bits and bobs, since me and my girlfriend are off biking around Europe for a month, leaving on Sunday! Also, I had a couple of unfortunate hardware failures that had my PC out of action for a fair while.

Anyway, all the down-time gave me an opportunity for a re-think, and whilst I still very much want to do this crazy adventure game, I’ve come to realise (with a little help from my friends!) that actually I’d be mad not to finish up CITS as soon as I can. As such, I’ll be spending my free time on that from now on, though of course that doesn’t leave long before Europe given that there’s plenty of preparation to do, as well as my graduation ceremony on Wednesday!

So, just to prove I mean business, here’s a fantabulous new screenshot for you. What, you can’t tell what’s different? Why, the tilt indicator of course, accurate to one ten-thousandth of a degree! I know it’s not a lot, but I’ve only had my development environment and all CITS’ dependencies set up for half an hour or so, give me a chance to get going Next up: getting the tilt meter to mean something, i.e. end the game when the island tilts too much!