Bazooka Duck at Dare 2010

Halfway there!

11th July 2010

Alright, alright, so I may have fallen slightly behind with the promised blog posts. We've been busy making a game, and thanks to our efforts we have an alpha version completed, which is great since we're now over halfway through the competition. You should be able to see some gameplay footage taken on Friday nestled within our page, so check it out!

The game itself is now somewhat playable, with waves of enemies spawning in and attacking your units and your base. The base is currently supposed to be the local village church converted to become a time machine, but we've had some mentors point out that this may be offensive to some people, so we're considering changing it. As you can see, Joe's managed to get the basic pathfinding in within the game, which behaves itself the majority of the time - some tweaking is still required!

The Dans have created the majority of the scene props which will be featured within the environment, so on Friday we had a meeting to design the actual layout of the level people will be defending from alien invasion at ProtoPlay, and Dan H is now hard at work creating the level from my terrible sketches.

Recent advice from mentors has changed theme from "you should plan more" to "you should playtest more", so on that note, we had someone actually play the game on Friday who hasn't spent the last five weeks programming Epoch Defence. It went surprisingly well, actually - he managed to not press the segfault button I've left in the game for people who mash the keyboard! So yes, now that we have winning and scores within our game, this is an open invitation to all to come play our game and try to beat Dan O'D's current high score of 563,116 with only two rounds - he didn't seem to realise that the AI wasn't working properly at the time. As you play, we'll analyse your every movement in order to make the game more intuitive and fun. I hear eye-tracking equipment is getting less invasive each year as well...

So, our plans for the coming weeks are to work on the user interface, fix any bugs, refix any bugs recreated by our "intelligent" fourth programmer, the Subversion code merging system, and generally polish the game. We now have particle effects for steam engines and explosions, but there's plenty left to be added. I've also spent a few days adding sound to the game. Everything feels a bit more alive now, but I'll need to spend even more time working on a system to stop the game completely overwhelming your ears with explosions, as Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds soundtrack plays in the background.

Thanks for reading,

Stephen