Starting to look like a game

Here it goes.

Ive been planning to write a new blog for some time now but I just couldnt push myself to free up some time and do it, until tonight.
So many things have happened and so many times just nothing happened and everything was quiet boring. Ive been working from time to time on 'our' gameprojects. Some times I really couldnt stop working and wished for summer break so could focus even more on the game making and as always when the time has come I got distracted. Its not that I didn't do anything. I just didn't spent the amount of time I wanted to spent. Except for the last 2 weeks. The last 2 weeks, or maybe more, i got myself some motivation and the good thing about that was that once I started the game making again, it motivated me even more. It got even better when the things I did payed off, looked good and felt good. I got that feeling that you get when you play your own game and think 'wow' this is starting to look like something.

(skip this if you would only like to read about (more) 'recent' things)
In juni, when summer break begon, I started prototyping a gametype idea I had for some while. The goal was to have a more tactical gameplay and make it a standard for players to work together. The 'basic' idea was to have two teams and two basis. Players have to defend their base and attack the enemys base. They can also capture/setup forward observation bases on the map to aid in destroying the enemys base.
Players cant just go everywhere. They first need to create a mssion before they can leave the base, or join one if they dont have a high enough rank to create one. This brings the first problem. How to prevent players from leaving the base? Some kind of invisible wall with a message "You need to select a mission before you can leave the base"? That wouldn't be very realistic and players should be able to defend their base without mission. There could be a situation where they must leave the base to defend it. Because of all the freedom I had in mind for this gametype its really hard to decide where the borders are. This was just one example but i could give alot more. I just hadn't put enough thought in the gametype yet.
I began coding the mission creation and join GUIs + functionality and eventually stopped working on the gametype prototype because I had some problems with the CommanderMap and Unproject(), which I needed to create new waypoint by clicking on the map. I did get (half) around the problem, I just got a incorrect position when zoomed. Maybe I will post a question about this in the forums sometime.

Now over to the last 2 weeks (or some more) and the reason for writing this blog.
The first week I mainly worked on the game with the 'forbidden name' talked about in my previous blog. We still havent decided what the new name is gonna be... I fixed some bugs, tweaked a few things to make the game more playable, added support for gametypes (before there was just one 'gametype') and worked on the very first map. The new map (its not yet finished) really does change things. Before the only map in the game was the default starter.racing map which functioned as a test map. Now it already feels more complete.

(screenshots show work in progress art or placeholder art)



And now about the last week. Some time ago we decided we should do something like GID or 'game in a weekend'. So 14 and 15 august we got togheter (normaly we do everything online) to do our own little 'game in two days'. We started at 3pm and worked till 5am in the morning, then slept till 11am and continued till, I think, 10pm. What we have accompleshed in that time? First we had to decide what kind of game we wanted to make. We already had some ideas ofcourse but we had to make sure we weren't fooling ourselves, that we could make that game, or atleast a nice beginning, in 2 days. We scrapped our first idea because it would have involved many physics. So then came the Zombie killing game idea, but arent zombies a little hard to model? "yes" my friend who does the art side thought. So why not use robots instead? "I already have a nice robot model we can use" he said while scrolling through his art map. So it got to be a robot killing game.
After setting everything up for a new project I began with coding some basic AI which would attack the player so we had something to shoot. Then added waypoint following code. Unfortunaly I then encounterd this bug where players diff walls werent found so if i checked if a players was in line of sight of an enemy it would return true, while there was a wall in front of him. And even more unfortunally that bug still hasn't been fixed... Im planning to rewrite the complete AI code someday.
So did we finish the game in just two days. No, but we did have a nice beginning and in no way did we fninish everything we planned but when we played the game we got a really nice feeling. It was fun.
The days after those 2 days I really worked hard to get bugs out and the game feels really solid now. In one testing session I came up with a new gametype, aside of deathmatch and Survival (hordes of robots attack you), you have to shoot each other out of the map, which often means shooting each other over a wall, using a explosive weapon.
Im really looking forward to releasing a demo or something.