Cities in the Sky

I managed to get loads done on Wednesday, but it’s all under the hood stuff (I wanted to ease myself back into development by writing something not too important). Basically I wrote some bits of maths code to remove a dependency on OPAL from some code that shouldn’t need it. The nice thing is that I wrote unit tests for everything as I went, so the new code has 100% test coverage and since I wrote the tests first it has a nice, simple and easy to use interface. This pleases me.

Thursday was not so successful – I started by streamlining the game a bit by removing some unnecessary screens and removing some crusty old graphics I had as placeholders, just to make it feel a bit more like a proper game. After that I tried making some half-decent graphics for the menu and in-game HUD, not to be totally functional but to get the look and feel right, and whilst I came up with something that looks good in Photoshop I didn’t manage to get that into the game too well – Ogre seems to like blurring textures a lot when not displayed at the exact original size, making text quite ugly. I haven’t solved that yet, but hopefully I won’t need to if the eventual UI system I use is good enough!

I also tried to improve the look of the sky – I went on holiday recently and took loads of photos from the plane so I could use them to get the feel of the environment right. I stumbled across Simul Weather (formerly Simul Clouds), which I’d seen screenshots of before, and decided it looks exactly how I want the environment to look, so I set about integrating an evaluation version with the game, but encountered many problems (probably my fault) and ended up with not a lot to show for my efforts. Ah well. I got some nice-looking mock-ups done though.

So, I’m back at work today and probably won’t be able to work on CITS again properly for another week and a bit. I’ll keep you posted on anything new though!

After a fair old bit of research and tinkering, I’ve decided to hold off on getting cracking on improving the interface since the GUI libraries available for Ogre just aren’t mature enough yet, and I have super-secret insider information that the solution I’m waiting for is in development. Once that reaches maturity I’ll be sure to start using it straight away as that’s the main area for improvement at the moment – the menus are horrible and the in-game interface is lacking things I want to show, and the current system makes this very time-consuming to change. I’ll eventually be using a Flash-based GUI system, which will allow me to develop interfaces in Flash (which is perfectly suited to the job) then send and receive messages to and from it from the game. Trust me, it’ll be beautiful!

It was my Birthday a few days ago (I’ve been around for 23 years now!), and my lovely girlfriend bought me a Wacom Bamboo Fun. I’ve been doodling away ready to try my hand at some concept art, with a view to getting a bit of direction art-wise, rather than the borrowed models and textures in use at the moment.

Right now though, I’ve got two days off work, so I’m going to be working on improving general gameplay – making it feel even more fun and making it just work as a game. That’ll involve improving the controls, tweaking the physics and other simulation parameters some more, and controlling the camera sensibly. After that I’ll post up another video, which will hopefully show that I haven’t just been sat on my arse this whole time!

I just allowed people to be born, to balance out all the people that get sent screaming (in a silent fashion) to their doom. The birth rate is linked to the number of buildings you have. Hopefully this will prevent the game feeling like it’s slowing down as you get further in (which is exactly the opposite of what I want!).

I also changed the lose condition from “angle > 25″ to “people == 0″, partly because it’s much more fun the second way and partly because it’s really difficult to stop the island tilting, which makes debugging things very difficult!

Incidentally, I felt something different when I played CITS last… fun. It’s actually starting to feel like a fun game, despite being painfully simple. Huzzah! Next up is getting some UI up to show the state of things, which will probably require a bit of effort since the overlays system in Ogre is terrible, and I’d rather use a proper GUI library (even if I have to write one myself).