Out of State

Hey it's Allen.

I am posting from a hotel in Kentucky on an iPod my friend Jacob Robinson has lent to me. I won't be able to work for the week. But the demo is fairly simple for us to handle we just need to work on getting a few different server client issues up to par. I've finished revisions to the game engine which greatly help us to not make sloppy game code leading to problems which ruined the march demo. Now I only need to work on a clean set of physics abstractions. After that, adding networking will a little graphical magic will sum up the new demo. We have clean networking in the old systems already and it's pretty fun.

Cya later guys!

Systems online

Hello all, I waited for the recent poll to close to make another post so here i go!

Recently we have gotten yet another team member! His name is Benjamin Bias, and so far he is not highly opinionated. His specializes in Networking, so you know what that means! We are finally getting over the dreadful networking hill in this project. Only after having him for a few days did he have our recent demo running online. It still had some issues, but he and the rest of the programming team are working on fixing those, to finally have something stable to show you guys! While the networking is being done, Allen has been revising the game engine, taking out unnecessary pieces of code, and simplifying others. Everything seems to be going smoothly, and we are well on our way to getting over this hill we all hate.

In other news, Allen has been doing some experiments with matrices, and has discovered very very powerful methods which we can use in many areas for not only AST, but for other projects we get involved in. However, I will wait for him to post sometime this coming week, in which he will go over some programming info in detail.

As for the poll you see to the right, we were surprised we didn't get more votes actually. We received 12 votes, 10 of which were likes, and 2 of which were dislikes. Pretty good numbers, and we are pleased. we would like to have gotten more likes, but hey we can't always get what we want. We will have another poll up once we make another release, which i am not sure when that will be. However! The next release will allow everyone to play together, online. So if there is anything to really be excited for, it is that you can play with your friends finally!

I think that is it for this post, we hope to have more info soon!

-Connor

P.S. Yes i did use two memes in one post :3

Post-Demo Developments

First time posting, try not to say anything stupid...

My name is Tyler Camp (aka GZ), and I'm the guy who developed the demo that was just recently released. Of course, it wasn't all my work, Allen, Mike (K), and I all contributed to the engine that is currently being used. But the important piece is the time frame in which the demo was developed:

Connor came to me about 3 days before his presentation stating that he was rushing to get his final pieces put together. I didn't know that the show was that Friday, but I offered to get a basic demo out for him.

Making the player class: 1 hour

Making the box class: 2 hours (with fiddling, I had to mess around with the physics mask to make it fit all of the sprites that were different sizes [Thanks Cameron])

Making the buttons: 1 hour

Adding strict line-drawing: 1 hour

Adding free-form line drawing: 1 hour

Adding views (and applying): 20 minutes

Swapping out player physics: 2 hours

Adding shadows: 30 minutes

Adding line/box clearing: 1 minute

If I went right through and made all of the underlying changes that I had ended up with, it would've taken me a total of about 5 hours of coding to make that demo. But, like with all games, I took my time adjusting the rotation and scaling rate of the buttons, the distance between line separations when in free-form, how much the shadows scaled based on the object's height, etc. Fortunately, even without a GUI to assist in creating the demo (we don't have a game editor, just a coding library), it took about as long as it probably would have if I was using Game Maker.

So, on to the actual point of this topic: What we're going to be doing now that this demo has been out.

Now that we have the physics and basic game project management mechanics completed, we have to focus on continuing with our GUI engine and creating a networking test bed for our online libraries. The GUI engine currently only has tabs, buttons, and text boxes, but it provides the basis of what we need to develop more components for an interface without too much of a hassle (and it also got me a 100 in my programming class, but who cares about that).

As for the networking testbed, we're developing it so that we can assure that any problems that arise will be a result of poor programming on the game development side, and not deriving from an inefficiency from the networking manager. Allen was put in charge of the networking piece of the engine when we had gotten to it, and unfortunately we all rushed to get a game out to test how well it did. We knew it worked, but we didn't know if it did what we wanted it to. Unfortunately, there was an IMMENSE amount of lag in that demo, and many of the game mechanics didn't work anyways. With the networking testbed we'll be able to focus on just the online piece of our engine and track the speed of each stage within our TCP message handling.

Fortunately, we'll be putting our GUI engine to work in that test bed since we've been getting tired of CLIs, so this should help us know whether or not my work will end up being usable.

So to sum it up, we'll be working on the GUI engine so that we can build a place to test how well we handle networking. One step at a time.

It has arrived!

Hello dearest of fans!

I am here to give you a little taste of what we have made starting from complete scratch! Now it may not seem like much to some of you, but please understand that this is only a small taste of the physics, and some graphical work.

Our biggest issue with the full game right now is getting the online to work, with that we can have something like this online, and keep adding to it. We hope that our issues with getting connections working are cleared soon, and we can let all of you see features upon features build the AST we have been trying encumber for so long.

This tech demo is a physics simulation, with a movable Shapian, push blocks, and terrain creation with the mouse. It is NOT online(as I stated before), and it takes place in what we call "Limbo". It is a never ending white room, which you could have endless sandbox fun!

You are able to see the square Leunamme Shapian, and 3 different types of push blocks(wooden crate, dirt clump, and stone). The Shapian is NOT animated, but when we release the alpha version of the game, you will see all player animations we have created thus far.

Make sure you read the text document labeled "CONTROLS" for the tech demos control layout, that will be all....

Enjoy! :3 <-- yes this is a link ;)

-Connor

Howdy!

Well hello there, it's Allen, and I promise I am not going to patronize you any more about how sorry we are about the slow progress we've been making.

The purpose of the post is just to let everyone know I am getting back to programming. I have been busy for a while and I still haven't quite finished an online class I am in. But the ol' days of C++ have been calling for me for quite a while and today I am going to begin easing myself back to work. I won't be right back in the middle of AST though, I have another project I am going to work on which might be related to the game a bit.

Anyway this marks my return to C++, anything could happen.
-Allen

Long time....no time....

Well hello guys, been awhile eh?

Things have been going very slow here with AST. However there is nothing we can do about that until the beginning of June. This is because of our schedules are very hectic lately. I am in the midst of begging Champlain College for more money, finishing up my senior project, as well as studying for finals. Allen is dealing with a rather large Latin class he has been putting off due to the development of A Shpaians' Tale. He told me he is on Chapter 15 out of 21, and is moving quite fast. I know that Tyler is busy with school and his internship at AMD, so hopefully by June things will calm down in school for all of us, and we can work full time on AST.

Although I am very busy, I have been throwing ideas around in my head for AST, and figured I would share them with you guys and see what you all think:

• Personal story: Your Shapian has their own personal story line throughout the game. This story is generated in a semi-random fashion. You will have a few choices during character creation, which change the generation of your Shapian's story.You story will deal with NPCs in the game, and possibly(I really want) others players as well.
• Binding quests: When you are in  party exploring the wilderness, there is a chance that a random quest will be put upon that party. This quest must be completed to leave the wilderness. As of now, we have come up with one example of this and that is a kidnapping quest. One player would get kidnapped from a group of trolls, or something of that sort. The other players in the party must rescue them, while the kidnapped player tries to escape for them self.
• Retiring: You can have the chance to retire your player, and he will be put into the real world as an NPC. He can give you quests which pertain to your personal story as well. If you retire your player, you clear a character slot in your account, and you can get small perks that you had before in you next character.

These are some of the recent ideas I have come up with, and discussed with some of the team. We want your input as well, so that we can have an idea of how we would implement them, or if we should implement them at all.

That is all for now guys, I will keep the blog updated, and I am going to be doing more Vlog entries covering  things like this as well.

'Till next time, this was your friendly neighborhood game designer,

-Connor

Work work work....

Hello everyone!

It has been awhile since i have spoken here.....almost 3 weeks in fact O_O

Well either way, Allen has been covering things on the blog pretty nicely, good job. I have been quite busy outside of AST, recently was accepted to Champlain College for their Game Design major. And I have to pay some deposits before the 1st of May.

However, I do always find time to come on, and see how the tech demo is looking. And it seems to be going well. You may be thinking to yourself "How so? You missed your deadline 2 weeks ago! D:" but I am very aware of the deadline we missed. However, we are still making the game even though we are 2 weeks off. Allen is in the process of rewriting some of the fundamental parts of our engine, but the sooner we do this, the less of a chance we miss more deadlines. He seems to be working rather quickly, and we are hoping to have everything working the way it should soon. We do have something playable....well......something working. I wouldn't call it "playable" since the amount of lag really makes things next to impossible to play. So these rewrites and fixes will really make things work the way we intended them to.

On the graphics side of things, we did finished the logo! :D check it out:

We will be making a few tweaks, but this is mainly what the logo will look like. It took a while to get thigns right, and we are very satisfied. However we would like if you told us what you think, so please leave a comment below!

With that I say, Hasta Luego!

-Connor