Plan for Thomas "Man of Ice" Lund

First plan of the year. Flash GUI component, adv. camera update, having interns, website work and !!! game dev

Damn - already 1/12th of the year is gone, and I dont even feel I've been doing all that I planned.

For the moment I'm working on all the items below

== Flash Gui Component ==
I was going to work a bit on an MNG component for large animations, but then someone (Thx Nic) pointed me in the direction of GameSWF.

So I've it compiling and stripped of SDL calls. Now onto integrating it as a GUI component for TGE. Unless I run my head into a showstopper, that will be a resource soon. But compiling GameSWF is not a breeze on Windows - took me more than planned at least.

I want to use the flash files for ingame animation sequences for my battleship game (see later)


== Adv Camera ==
For a few weeks I've been planning to update the adv. camera resource. Both with contributions and with my own code. Once the flash component is done (or dead) I'll start on that. Nothing major planned, but a lot of cleanup and working on interpolation. About time :-)


== Website ==
We finally managed to get a website up running. Phew. After several month of poking at it, we went live a few days ago. There is still a lot of smaller details to get fixed, but overall I think the result is quite cool. Its 100% database driven and with an easy home cooked CMS for everyone to write content. The URL is www.questless.com - criticism is always appreciated - and yes I know there are a few gfx items that aren't done.

Content will be added soon for real, and I plan to write a TGE related article each month or so. We will try to do some marketing of ourselves and our games/products periodically - lesson learned at the sessions of IGC 2004.


== Game Dev ==
Oh - my favorite.

The top secret battleship game is shaping up. We have contracted someone to develop a robust and fully featured naval vessel code class, and that is under development at the moment. Meanwhile we are working hard to implement tutorials and the actual campaigns.

The game is a 3rd person battleship shooter game using TGE (what else), and we have high hopes of getting this done and shipped before summertime. Screenshots, movies and marketing will come your direction soon :-)

Some of the big unknowns are still the balance between single player vs multiplayer and realism vs arcade. We want to have both, but the mix is hard to determine up front. So it will come down to playtesting and tweaking as soon as possible to adjust everything for fun gameplay.

We are a bit scared of the multiplayer aspect. ThinkTanks, Zap and Lore are showing clearly that getting players to play multiplayer games isnt just a matter of putting up servers and releasing a great game. Thats why I think we will put way more singleplayer content in than multiplayer, and then try some alternative approaches to the multiplayer part.

One idea is to have something similar to Tribes 2 duel mod. Thus I'm going to have an intern code up a "duel mod" server, that can pair up gamers who wish to duel someone. The idea is to press a button saying "find someone to duel" and within 15-20 seconds it should have paired up 2 players. If there are none, then it should create a bot on a server to duel against. Auth server and master server are already done for this game, so it should be quite easy to pair up players with an additional server process.

Realism vs. arcade is much harder. One one side you want realism - wakes after the ship, reloading guns, limited firing arcs, subs, planes, aircraft carriers - phew. All the stuff you keep dreaming about. But as everyone knows realism != fun.

On the other hand going too much arcade and doing a "1942" kind of arcade game doesnt feel right either. Then again people always like to blow up stuff with big guns - and the guns on our ships are big :-)

I recently read a nice little article on the net about Halo and playtesting. They had given the aliens very low hitpoints and you could blow them to crap in no time. Great fun, but people felt that the AI was too easy. Then they changed the number of hitpoints for an alien, and suddenly all playtesters reported that they thought the AI was much better and harder to beat! And that only by adding more hitpoints to the enemy.

So I think this could apply to "realism" vs "arcade" too in our game. By having many hitpoints you can have very long and interesting tactical battles with only 2-3 enemy ships - on the other hand we would need tons of ships if you could blow them out of the water in no time. Thus this could make the game "feel" more realistic, the AI better and we do not have to put in as much content. A winner for all.

I guess playtesting will show if our initial approch is the right one. The earlier we reach that point, the better.


Thats it for now. Lot of work to be done, and I still have my game installer/updater + ActiveX installer products to wrap up too. They have been untouched for too long now waiting for feedback. Might as well try to pick someone to test them and get them up to product level in quality.