Plan for Adam Beaumont

Things on Roboherd have been progressing this week, although not as quickly as we would have liked. I had some ideas over the weekends about some more level objects we could add in to the game and started coding a couple up. So far forcefields, switches and falling objects have made it in game but not without a struggle.

Getting a transparent forcefield stretched my modelling skills to the max (!) and I had a major headache with shadows - they just kept disappearing. After rewriting stuff, trying to use decals instead and a whole bunch of head scratching I realised that shadows don't get rendered if their casting object is culled from the scene. As my shadows were a long way away from the object casting them they were getting culled frequently. A quick rewrite and a bit of a change of perspective now means I have them where I want them. Unfortunately that took a bit of time so some of the other stuff I was thinking about is going to have to wait.

The good thing about this kind of game for me at the moment is that each object is a mini project in itself - you get to think of something cool, code it up and get it in game, then move on to the next thing. It's actually a really good way of developing, just building self contained little pieces of code and dropping them into the game world. Nothing takes too long to do, so you're always able to work on interesting stuff and keep the project moving forward. Obviously we still need a mapping person to put them all together in the right place but we're working on sorting that out.

Meanwhile as well as doing some new graphics Vanilla has updated the site (www.roboherd.com) - it's looking really good now and I've finally got the high scores hooked up to the right version of the game, so when people play it should be posting scores onto the website (firewall permitting). I'm probably going to have to clear all the scores down over the weekend as the levels have changed so much that some of the times up there are impossible with the existing layouts !

We've had quite a positive response to Roboherd over the last few weeks so it's definitely spurring us on to work harder on it. With a bit more effort we should have something that will give a better idea of how we see the game and where we think it can go - we're aiming to get another dev snapshot out there sometime soon.