Their servers were down for a while. So nobody could log in and use it… You know, except pirated versions, that have ripped off online componentry and work smoother…
Anyways, I’m logged in now, so I can start working on it…
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DAY 1:
I fell over on the first hurtle. I have issues programming the map perspective view.
3 hours later I have zero results in terms of world map view.
I have done some mental gymnastics and I think I have a solution. When I get home after work I will try and program it. If not - the thing will be done tomorrow.
Once that is done I will try and make the cards, so I can start doing the interactions programming.
But first things first. 10x10 map looks much larger than I anticipated. Still I will do testing on that size.
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It’s not working…
I’m gonna ask in the game maker forum for ideas, cause my brain just refuses to solve the freaking riddle…
DAY 2:
After I deleted everything and started from scratch, I slowly but surely checked EVERYTHING and what do you know, if I actually pay attention it ain’t that hard…
Right, so those are my fields, tiles, etc… That is exactly what I wanted to make. Now the next step is to create the cards. After that I will make the interactions between cards and land…
If anybody is interested I will post the code, but if not, and I don’t blame ya, I will just show the result.
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Extra thoughts…
So, I need the cards now. That’s fairly straightforward.
I need a large array containing each card’s data. I need one array, containing the cards, that are in the deck at the time and one array of the cards, that are in the hand of the player.
I have done those kinda of things a lot, so it shouldn’t be that difficult. Now what I need to establish after that is the states of the tiles on the map. is it free or taken, is it players or enemie’s, is it a city or a mine or a forest or a mountain or whatever… That will be an ass to program. But for now all I will do is mountains and fields. And I will do farms and villages only as cards. If those interactions go well I will do more - forests, rivers, mines, etc…
So here are my most immediate goals:
- Do the card arrays. Something small more for testing than actual gameplay.
- Do the tile status mechanics.
- Do the drag and drop for placing towns and stuff on the map. Change status, kill card.
- Then layer more mechanics on top of already working mechanics.
Devember is coming, so yeah… I’m quite positive about this…
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POLL:
Shall I do procedural generated maps or hand made maps?
Procedural generation gives much larger variety of content, takes longer time to program and tweak to work properly and can make 10000 bowl of soup - each slightly different, but overall the same.
Hand crafted levels gives less variety of content, but can give much more interesting content. In the food analogy, it may have only 50 bowls, but there will be all sorts of soups and food in them.
- Do procedural generated maps
- Do hand crafted maps
0 voters
Also hand crafted levels may allow me to release a level design tools later on for players to toy with…
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DAY 3:
I started work on the card system and I realized something: I need to do so much more work on the map and tiles before I am ready to start working on the cards, it’s not even funny, and I am not talking about generation or stuff. Just a lot of under the hood setup that needs to be done as a basis.
So as soon as I realized how far ahead I am going from where I actually am, my goals momentarily changed…
- Large data grid (2D array) for each tile - basically step 2 of my previous plan.
- Visualization of some sort so I can see if my systems are working properly
- Card mechanics setup, meaning cards database with all the stuff
- Card interactions with each other
- Card interactions with the tiles and the world…
Is it obvious I am getting excited? Those blog style posts really help me gather my thoughts, so I will do them fairly often.
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Please do, this is interesting stuff! 
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Hand made. More control. More soul.
That too. Modding creates potentially infinite replay value.
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I’m curious, what tools are you using for this project (or the ones in the past) ?
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Game Maker Studio 1,4, the one that I will never forget, @anarekist bought me some time ago.
It have a pretty nice sprite editor, so I will be using that. And for sound - I haven’t decided what to do, but sounds will be added much later on. First things are the basic mechanics of the game.
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DAY 4:
Absolutely fruitless…
OK, OK, maybe not absolutely fruitless, cause I did some research, so I know what to do later on in the game, but in terms of coding and actual progress - absolutely fruitless…
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DAY 5…
God damn it… I was asking some questions in the game maker forums and they gave me some answers that made me think about stuff.
That’s not all that bad, since I am still in the very beginning. Basically the idea I have is to make the entire map data stored in an external file. .ini or something. .ini is probably the best option, because that will allow me to edit and create maps in notepad instead of coding a bunch of stuff… So that’s my first task. Create the system for making maps and make sure it works properly. There goes the entire week doing this.
I have worked with .ini files before. They are super useful, cause everything is organized, but on the other hand there was always some issues with using them… But we shall see. I will try and create a couple maps just to make sure this thing works.
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DAY 6…
I’ve been thinking… I’m gonna do a lot of probably unnecessary coding now for file communication, especially with the few ideas I have in mind. It’s still gonna be a progress, so I won’t say it’s a bad thing, but it definitely isn’t the basic game mechanics I wanted to focus on.
Oh well. As soon as I finish with those .ini files stuff I can move towards the cards setup and stars dealing with the really comes stuff…
Have to figure out the hierarchy setup I want to do for the cards. I don’t really know how to do that. I have 2 kinds of cards - people and buildings. And initial buildings should unlock other buildings and people will be trained into warriors and priests and what not if you have the proper buildings constructed…
That is going the be a huge chain of if statements that will be pain to program. I really have to figure out a simpler way to deal with that…
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OK, let’s see if this makes sense to anyone…
The UI would be 2 buttons for 2 decks - buildings deck and people deck.
When you click the building deck you see all your available buildings. Every Click of the mouse the UI will check what is build and will only show the currently unlocked cards. Same with the people. When you open the deck, the UI will check and display only the unlocked and trained people you have.
That way I won’t have to program constant if statements in a bunch of different objects. It’s a mouse click on a button and the button itself will do the job.
I was thinking about doing arrays and sorting and indexing and what not, but I think this will be the best option. Its two objects, running one script each every time you click on one of them.
Have you thought about storing the current state in some kind of local sqlite or other file based database? This would allow you to not have to calculate certain things all over, plus would natively allow grouping, sorting and such through SQL Queries.
Maybe im completely off though.
Plus you wouldn’t have to define every single card as an Object or such. You could just have a “Card” Object and all the possible cards stored in the DB.
And you could have “easy” history of all that happend. Allowing for things like easier undo options and maybe even replays without having to change how you store data, or having to come up with history Objects or Log files.
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You are not million miles away. There are data structures built in, that allow Sorting and grouping and stuff like that. The issue is I’m not entirely comfortable using them.
I already have a database with all the cards and every instance calls to the database to fetch the data I need for the specific card. Basically I have 1 object Tile, that can be everything and one object Card, that can be everything.
I also have one tile controller and one card controller that just tell each tile what it is. Technical speaking it gives it an index and the object fetches it’s own data from the external file.
Hmmmm…
I don’t think that’s possible. Not without any extra log or storage files… Maybe not external files, but I still need to record events and the time they have happened…
DAY … whatever…
I’m struggling with the .ini files… I’ll wrestle them and may switch to txt files, but for now I’ll fight the .ini files…
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I confused myself 
I did some work on the project, then I checked a couple objects in there and I have done the same executions in different objects and I’m getting confused as to what to do now
OK, I will fight my own stupidity now and see what will happen… Hopefully by the end of the week I may have some workable algorithm for the entire map system and stuff…
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