| Stefan Gagne ( @ 2008-02-21 08:52:00 |
Fishing, Fishing, Fishing, and Piccarats
So.
As mentioned, I pulled a 36 hour stint. Professor Layton is a damn good game, and kept me enrap't for that entire period. The art style was great, music was pleasant, story was engrossing, and it kept me hooked. If I have to assign it a fault, it was for making me paranoid about not having enough hint coins or losing unlockables due to low Piccarat score... leading me to restart my DS every time I got a puzzle wrong or had to spend coins. If I knew that clearing the game would unlock everything regardless of score I'd be more willing to just guess at things and experiment more.
The other big nooz this weekend was the fishing game, which I've gone into detail on. This is probably the biggest singular coding project I've ever done (if you don't count my games as one huge project). I had to code a fishing rod, local relay server, master responder server, sub-master item servers, networked vendors with profit share, pet fish drivers, aquariums that interact with pet fish, aquarium backdrop loaders, and a fishing contest engine and probably a few more things I'm leaving out. All these bits talk to each other in some degree and needed to be reasonably secured against spoofed requests while cutting down on bandwidth and response time needs.
I'm happy to say that all of the above are done. After one and one half weeks of furious work (we started last Monday) the scripts are finished, save the occasional fix. I've even got my components -- the contest board, vendor, and two aquarium -- textured with some really nice wood textures. Not just "take a 512 from a texture library and slap it on there" but carefully positioned and redesigned for various purposes, ranging from a sloped side piece to a round button to a semicircular wood carving of our logo to a product window that looks like an old paint overlay on wooden planks. Damn good stuff.
But my stuff isn't the most visually amazing. No, that'd be
tangsm's work, which is bordering on spectacular... natural, carved organic shapes like tree log benches, rowboats with oars, docks, etc. Using the new "sculpties", she's made SL look less like circa 1992 Quake and more like circa 2005 Oblivion. Damned nice lookin', basically.
...once again, I have failed to provide screenshots. Jen, can you do this tonight? Every time I post "I'll take some tonight" I completely fail to remember to do so. @_@;
Anyway! We'll be having an open beta of the whole system soon, with fully functional L$1 rods (about a quarter of one US penny) to test with, albeit ones that expire on the 15th. We'll probably extend the beta test to Extropia and any other sims that want in on it, to make sure the cross-sim communications systems work. Stay tuned for more details.
So.
As mentioned, I pulled a 36 hour stint. Professor Layton is a damn good game, and kept me enrap't for that entire period. The art style was great, music was pleasant, story was engrossing, and it kept me hooked. If I have to assign it a fault, it was for making me paranoid about not having enough hint coins or losing unlockables due to low Piccarat score... leading me to restart my DS every time I got a puzzle wrong or had to spend coins. If I knew that clearing the game would unlock everything regardless of score I'd be more willing to just guess at things and experiment more.
The other big nooz this weekend was the fishing game, which I've gone into detail on. This is probably the biggest singular coding project I've ever done (if you don't count my games as one huge project). I had to code a fishing rod, local relay server, master responder server, sub-master item servers, networked vendors with profit share, pet fish drivers, aquariums that interact with pet fish, aquarium backdrop loaders, and a fishing contest engine and probably a few more things I'm leaving out. All these bits talk to each other in some degree and needed to be reasonably secured against spoofed requests while cutting down on bandwidth and response time needs.
I'm happy to say that all of the above are done. After one and one half weeks of furious work (we started last Monday) the scripts are finished, save the occasional fix. I've even got my components -- the contest board, vendor, and two aquarium -- textured with some really nice wood textures. Not just "take a 512 from a texture library and slap it on there" but carefully positioned and redesigned for various purposes, ranging from a sloped side piece to a round button to a semicircular wood carving of our logo to a product window that looks like an old paint overlay on wooden planks. Damn good stuff.
But my stuff isn't the most visually amazing. No, that'd be
...once again, I have failed to provide screenshots. Jen, can you do this tonight? Every time I post "I'll take some tonight" I completely fail to remember to do so. @_@;
Anyway! We'll be having an open beta of the whole system soon, with fully functional L$1 rods (about a quarter of one US penny) to test with, albeit ones that expire on the 15th. We'll probably extend the beta test to Extropia and any other sims that want in on it, to make sure the cross-sim communications systems work. Stay tuned for more details.