Dev Diary

Now back to my regular programming: game development updates. If you are subscribed to the RSS feed prepare for daily updates for the rest of this month, because the Github GameOff 2017 started last night! Theme: Throwback The theme announced at 23:37 last night (local time) is throwback! As my cousin observed it’s a nice open theme, but I suspect most people will do the obvious thing, so this jam is likely to be remake central… Be prepared to see a lot of CGA style graphics like the banner at the top of this page! ...

Nothing to report. Just work. No reason to hope that the next 7 days will go any better… This is probably it for my jam attempt, but this is a game I would like to finish or at least get to a more complete prototype stage - so I’ll be back - hopefully soon…

Unfortunately tonight the time I had to spend on this project was limited to a short hour and the 5 minutes it takes to write this update. Work kept me busy until 18:30 and even that didn’t feel enough today… Outcomes I’ve started along the path to implementing violence in my game! Hacking will help you win fights, but taking the other guy out of the fight permanently isn’t going to stop being a feature of competitive conflict resolution anytime soon… ...

Yesterday money began flowing into mega corporation accounts from the new advanced economics in the city blocks they controlled. Today I balanced it out by putting in place some mechanisms to take money away again. Outcomes I started off by fixing the issues left over from yesterday: Tweaked city generation to produce a mix of quality for the city blocks with better ones closer to the centre of the city. ...

Today I managed to finish hacking together my more advanced city blocks that have a bit more detail to them to allow for more complex economic calculations. That wasn’t enough - for them to actually be worth anything I also had to implement random city generation, which was a bit more than I planned on doing today, but at least it’s all mostly working now! Outcomes See for yourself: I’m pretty sure there’s a few bugs that I’ll have to fix tomorrow: ...

Had a reasonably good evening - nothing finished yet, but I wrote a couple of hundred lines of code for the new CityBlock implementation that will start to bring about a more complex economic system for the game. If I manage to spend a decent amount of time tomorrow I should have the new income system in place with player settable tax rate and some UI to showcase it. ...

I fell asleep on the couch last night… so no progress to report today. Outcomes

Today MegaCorps has finally become a game! You can lose and you can win - none of the stuff that will make doing so fun is in yet, but from a purely academic point of view I now consider it a game. As a bonus I re-watched the first few episodes Ghost In The Shell S.A.C. 1st Gig which was certainly inspiring. Outcomes I managed to add the last two things that I needed to consider this a game: ...

The peer reviews deadline here at Entelect snuck up on me a bit this time around - between that and efforts to revive the QA database on my current project after an unfortunate case of Microsoft SQL’s JDBC driver quietly ignoring my instanceName setting, because there was a port specified in my connection string, I’ve had absolutely no time to work on my game today.

Today was just a shambles! I spent the bulk of it trying to Microsoft SQL’s JDBC driver authenticating to our local SQL server using domain authentication instead of local server authentication. What makes it hard is that it has to work off Linux, so I’ve had to deal with the Java Kerberos implementation and it’s oh so helpful error messages (here’s an amusing / terrifying list). Then I nearly got caught in a hail storm on the way home and to top it off 15 minutes after I reached home the storm hit and lightning took out the power in our area, so I basically slept until 21:00 when the power came on again instead of doing any of the work I needed to get done before tomorrow night. ...