Plan for Adam Beaumont

Quite an eventful month since I last posted - my wife and I had a baby girl so the whole world feels like it's been turned upside down, what with night feeds and nappy changes. Anyway, development on Roboherd continues...

We've done a bit more with the site and the forums are now up and running and being used (by the dev team at least) - currently we have one public and a couple of dev forums. There are only 5 people signed up so we're not really being overrun with a need to add any more! I've posted up a link to the Roboherd guide to mapping on the general forum - this is the first draft of what I hope will be the repository for all things required to make a roboherd map work. At the moment its just a list of things that need to go into the .mis file but eventually it will have details on all the map objects and how they can be used and linked. If you get round to reading it then let me know if you have any feedback.

Feedback from the last demo we released highlighted an issue with our control machanism - for some people it was fine but the general consensus was that for noobs or none fps players a two handed system was going to be too complicated. Solving this control problem was a bit of an issue - an overhead view was suggested but we felt that was going to change the whole nature of the game and turn it into something that might almost as well be 2d instead of 3d. So we thought about it for what seemed like ages with no success and then finally a breakthrough ! We have now come up with something that keeps the 3d look but also means you can play with just your mouse (although there may be a few other keys you can press if you get stuck). We're calling it 'chariot mode' because you basically just get dragged along behind the robo you're focusing on.

So far it seems to work really well and actually makes the game easier to play (which must be a good sign!). We're putting together some HUD improvements and then we'll be ready for a new release - it might come out as a dev snapshot but if not then watch out for another plan or maybe even something on the website www.roboherd.com

We're still having trouble getting anyone else to join our team - so far we've had a few close misses from people wanting to help out on the mapping side but nothing done as yet. We've still got things we can work on in the meantime to make the game better and hopefully each new release should increase profile and interest so for the moment we aren't panicking and are willing to see what happens.

After we get this release out of the way I am seriously considering stopping new development and trying to port the code over to Mac to see how easy it would be to get it compiled up there. Obviously this could be a huge undertaking but I've been thinking about doing it for a while and if we have a demo that's playable I think getting some feedback from the mac community might be a good idea.

Finally I had that mid-project thing happen to me the other day where I came up with a *really great game idea* - so far I have resisted the temptation to do anything more than idly think about it as there is nothing worse than stopping what you are doing now to chase after another 'even better idea'. I read somewhere that in this situation if it really is a good idea then it will still be there when you finish the project you are already working on so don't get distracted. Hopefully we can stick the course with Roboherd - it's slowly starting to come together so actually getting it finished is becoming something that is more and more believable.