I’ve got a paper and 50 pages of useless nonfiction reading due tomorrow, and none of the dialogue for mission 4 is in. Mission 5 isn’t even begun. We may cut it out altogether, but that’s not a certainty yet. Theoretically, 1-4 could stand on their own.
I made some improvements to the design of missions 2 and 3, not that anyone’s actually played them yet.
New Build: Now with 30% Less Suck
The second level used to suck. Now it doesn’t suck. See if you can figure out why. Hint: no annoying timer, more carnage.
Oh, and the dialogue is in flux. If you get random crashes, it’s probably due to Python’s crappy unicode support.
One homework assignment has been pushed from Sunday to Thursday, but I still have homework due on Tuesday and an exam on Monday.
Dialogue for missions 1-3 is complete, and I added a sweet new laser gun that will be introduced in mission 4. The dialogue allows for the possibility of skipping mission 5 entirely, so we may leave it out until Tuesday, since this week is stuffed full of midterms.
We’ve finally edited all the dialogue and cutscenes. I’m in the process of inserting it into the game and messing with timing. If we don’t win something for story, I’m going to have to take a cold shower.
I still haven’t scripted the last level, but I think it’s more important to finish the first 4 first. You’ll probably see a new build today.
I put in the finalized music and all of the Mission 4 levels. The dialogue is about to undergo a comprehensive change, but the levels themselves are there now. There’s also a nifty credits screen if you beat all 4.
I tweaked the content, balanced various units, and cut down the memory usage. Now it hovers between 100-200 MB RAM usage instead of 200-300, which was already an improvement from 400+.
If you play the game all the way through, around Mission 3, the frame rate will go way down and the music will start to play twice as fast. I have no idea why this happens. However, it should be fine if you relaunch the game and load from the Autosave.
The code is getting kind of crazy. If you remove psyco (the unsafe optimizer), the game becomes unplayable. It’s fairly obvious that I have memory leaks, but I don’t have time to track them down. If I ever want to work on gw0rp again after this contest, I will probably rip out half of it and rebuild. Fortunately, the level and saved game formats are solid, so I won’t lose any content.
My resource loading system is excellent for simple games, but it does not scale well at all. I will probably write a nicer library after the contest and release it.
I realize that no one is actually playing the new content, but I put more in anyway. David sent me a new track, and I put in a few of my own creations. The music is now non-crappy, so you can turn that slider back up in Settings. There’s a whole new level set sans dialogue, and Calvin and I have refined Mission 2. Consider this a polish release.
The first level track is probably not going to be in the final release. I’m still waiting on one more track from David.
Oh, and Calvin is a god among men. Not as good as me, though – I cracked 100 posts and hit senior member. Take that!
I just cut down gw0rp’s initial memory usage and launch time by two thirds. It still leaks like Swiss cheese, but at least it’s a trickle and not a flood.
There was a pretty nasty bug that would cause a crash in the second mission. I just put up a new build that fixes it and includes 10 extra megabytes of content that you can’t reach yet.
Today I looked at Activity Monitor and saw that gw0rp is using 400 MB of RAM. I am going to fix that today, I hope.
I just realized that next week is midterms week! That is awesome, especially since uDevGames ends this Sunday! I am so excited to have to finish gw0rp and study for midterms at the same time!
I put David’s latest sounds in, plus a few of my own. I still need to tweak various levels, but all sounds are now in. The new thruster sound is much less annoying.
I updated the big shooty part of Mission 2. Now it works like it’s supposed to.
Non-obvious note: the “restart level” button on the pause screen will just take you back to where you crossed environments. It won’t restart the entire mission. If you make a mistake, don’t be afraid to use it.
I just realized that I should add a “restart mission” button as well, but it will take a good amount of extra code, because I’ll have to provide a way to mark missions, delete all progress past those marks, and send the player back to the first part of the mission. I’m not too worried about it right now, because I can beat the entire game in less than fifteen minutes.
Beyond that, as far as changes go…well, I don’t know where to start. The ship handles a bit differently now. It should be easier to aim. There’s a ton more content, but it’s not 100% finished. The pause screen has been improved.
Unfinished things:
-Blue laser bullets don’t show up well over asphalt
-Dialogue and helpful arrows not complete
-Text bleeds off the side of the unit list in the pause screen
-Various bugs that you probably won’t notice because they don’t crash the game
-Other stuff I’m forgetting because I’m tired
Calvin and I just had a talk about how the last level will look. I don’t know if we’ll finish scripting all five major levels before the deadline, but the art is almost done.
I added a workaround for a confusing sound bug today and added the ability to have decals that appear over the player. Still scripting level 2.
Or rather, I only know of four bugs, and I only really care about fixing two of them. Today I finished populating all of the five sublevels of level 2 and tying them together. There is only a teensy bit of scripting to do before I can show it off. Hopefully, I’ll have time to fix the bugs and get something released this weekend.
I put non-key-using units back on the list in the pause screen, which made it quite cluttered, so I rearranged it.
Known bugs which you won’t even see:
-Releasing a unit after loading from a save doesn’t release its child units, leaving a few hanging in space from time to time
-Music volume doesn’t take effect until you exit to the title screen and go back
-Pointer location not saved if it points to a location instead of an object (you’ll never notice, I have a workaround)
-Rock type 2 occasionally fails to appear…kind of mystified about this one
