So I’ve rolled out a new version of Luncheon of the Dead Here.

There is still a fair amount of placeholder art in there, and I realized that I have completely neglected sound, but it’s incredibly close to being complete. I suppose that the silence is a side effect of me always playing flash games with the sound muted by default. I’m debating on whether it is truly necessary at this point, so I won’t be too crushed if the game remains silent into the final release, we’ll see.

Even though the idea was to spend the next few weeks polishing, putting a version out there now has some stronger pros than cons at this point. The biggest ‘Pro’ being that it has helped motivate the dash to the finish line. If there’s a chance that anyone could stumble across it without the benefit of my ‘it’s still a work in progress’ disclaimer text, that sort of gets my butt in gear to get on with the polishing already.

That’s about all at this point. This and recent posts have been uninformative and self indulgent, I’ll be the first to admit. However, after all my free time being consumed with the actual work, it’s difficult to regurgitate the minutia of that experience without getting burned out. Future posts will be more interesting, and hopefully will allow for dialogs about interesting topics, I promise.

-Joe

So I just finished creating the unit animation engine. Essentially, that’s the doodad that will handle picking an appropriate frame buffer for a unit’s current actions (walking, moving, taking damage, etc.) and stepping through said frame buffer on each iteration of the game loop to simulate motion. Hooray for aesthetics!

That is pretty much the final major component that I had to implement before the game is functionally complete. By that I mean that the game play mechanics and underlying engine is in place, the UI responds more or less as it will in the finished product, but the look just isn’t quite finished. Placeholder art needs to be swapped with real art, the instruction page needs to fleshed out and prettied up, and the website pretty much needs a complete rework until it is minimally acceptable, but it’s getting close.

It’s at this point in any project that I just want to stay up all night coding and photoshopping and furiously sprinting to the finish, but I’m going to pace it out and most likely draw these final pieces out for 2-3 more weeks.

That sums up the progress thus far. It’s not terribly informative I know, but mostly this post has been an exercise in bleeding off energy before I collapse for the night. It was either that or dive back into the project and be up until 4am.

-Joe

So, not unlike a quickly sobering bar fly, I have decided to put ‘the girls’ away. The pre-pre-Alpha has been taken offline, after having gathered some feedback and info from the select small group of folks that even know this project exists at this point.

I was made aware of some fairly serious performance issues in the game engine, mostly due to pathfinding. So I’ve retooled the guts a bit to allow more graceful scheduling of that most processor intensive part of the engine, and that should help pep things up a bit when the zombie count gets ridiculous.

At this point I’m implementing a rudimentary animation engine, so the action will get a bit prettier in future iterations. I’m wary that the increased prettiness will have a hefty performance cost, so we’ll have to see what trade-offs prove to be worthwhile as the situation develops.

I anticipate that I have another month of development before I’m ready to unleash the game. I was hoping for a shorter time line, but I want to be sure it’s done properly. Hell, a month may even be optimistic, but I’m going to cling that hope never the less.

Aaaaand, I think that wraps it up for now.

Move along citizens, nothing to see here.

-Joe out.