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Sunday, May 15, 2011

Races implemented and other goodies!

I've finished the fleet list screen (screenshot below), and discussed the game with a friend. He mentioned that the new game has a serious bug. If there's less stars than there are empires, the game freezes because it's trying to place each empire in their own star system. So I decided to redo the "New Game" screen and add other features that I've been meaning to add for a while.

What will the new screen include?
An ability to add or remove empire (no longer set to 12 empires like it is right now)
An ability to specify AI type (it won't be levels of difficulty, but rather, AI files that the game loads in) and difficulty slider (if you set AI slider to 110%, it means the AI have 10% bonus to everything it outputs/research/etc, making it more of a challenge). So you can combine, say "TurtleAI" that likes to research and defend more than attack, with slider set to 120% for a tough nut to crack.
An ability to set the percentage of stars that will be black holes
The existing features (galaxy generating, size, racial selection, etc)

So in order to achieve the above, I need to implement both races and AI loading (the AI files would be empty, aside from name of AI). I've added data structure for races, and implemented race loading. Each race have its own graphic file that includes the avatar for the race, and ship art.

When the new game screen is done, I will add the ship art from the races to ship design/construction, then work on the planet list screen. Then I will release the final free version. After that version, I won't be releasing any more versions because I intend to publish this game. There will be a demo which will come out after I've published the game. The published version will have professional artwork, probably redesigned screens if the design can be improved on, sounds, AI, network multiplayer, and bug fixes/polishing.

Yes, that's right, network multiplayer will be added. A friend and i talked about AI development, and one good way to learn how AI should behave is by watching players play the game. So that convinced me to add network multiplayer.

And now, finally, the screenshot of the fleet list screen:

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