I’ve had to start this challenge a little early, albeit all the early stuff I did was prep and foundation work.
<<Cross-posted from TiltTheWindmill>>
Welp, officially taking part in 7-day real-time-strategy challenge, a.k.a 7dRTS. (More info)
This is the first dev-log from the first three days. I’ve hard to start early for reasons stated below.
This is really the last chance I’ll get to make “full” game until December thanks to my silly decision to do Honours research.

20/07:
Laying some ground work in advance since I lose a whole day during the challenge.
Working on a dragbox because you can’t have much of an RTS without one. Have two different control methods as well, one more suited for certain ports (provided this gets done.)
Still working on some design decisions such as resources and their allocation, flow, maximum etc.
Still have no title.
Dragbox is now working perfectly. Marvellous.
Everything is a unit, unless it’s a building.
Tomorrow, the town will be born. Possibly some more back-story and narrative stuff.

Song of the day: Strands Of Golden Light by Seirom

21/07
Most of the day was spent out.
Added ability to issue commands in a basic fashion.
Working on basic pathfinding for units.
Basic pathfinding done. Units can now move around neatly.
Haven’t had all that much time to work on it so far.
Progress in gif form: http://i.imgur.com/DnZHqou.gif
Whiteboard:

Song of the day: Solarfall by Immortal

22/07: The official start of 7dRTS. [Day 1]
Fixed a weird movement bug for the hero character.
Started some of the unit nitty-gritty.

Screen is now divided. Having resizing issues though.
Resizing issues fixed. Still working on town. (Plan)
Progress in gif form: http://i.imgur.com/YEUCKVN.gif
Whiteboard:

Song of the day: Arise In Gondolin by Emyn Muil

—-

So, how is it going so far really?
Well, despite a whole lot of doing nothing to writing a lot then scrapping most of it and writing it again, some progress has been made at least. Not as much as I would like but hey.
I think tomorrow night I might disclose my design and goals for this challenge. I would right now, but alas, I’m still finalising some stuff.
The majority of the stuff done so far has been setting-up and design decisions. By Wednesday evening, most of that should be done. (HARHAR).
By Friday evening or Saturday midday, I plan on having the bulk of this done so I can spend the weekend working on music, story and (HAJSKHKJASH) art.
Will be posting a more detailed post tomorrow (hopefully.)

(I hope you enjoy the song of choice for each day along with progress GIFs and whiteboard crap and other images. Tomorrows post will hopefully be filled with much more…)

<<cross-posted again from TiltTheWindmill>>
23/07:
Putting off map design by messing around with cameras.
Alrighty, that stuff is being put off until later.

(IU*ASHDOIUAHSD Fed up with my original concept. Need to come up with something new. At least what I’ve made so far is really just an RTS base.

…later…

HAVE A NEW CONCEPT!
This new idea is completely different to my original one. But luckily, most of what I have so far can be used.
It is now divided into two distinct areas: RTS & RPG. (I do use the term RPG VERY loosely though.)
I will explain more later once both sections are a bit better.
RPG mode now has nice cameras and keyboard/pad control.
RTS mode is, well, the same as before so far.

The split has occurred in code. Will work on both much more tomorrow.

Progress (not in gif form.):

Very little has happened apart from the town layout.(and the comically bad mini-map) I usually am terrible when it comes to level/map design but this is alright.
I will elaborate on things tomorrow evening I hope. I have a lot to do before I comfortable talking about it.

No whiteboard photo today as it’s near identical to yesterdays…

//Discuss technical stuff
Alrighty, I should have talked about this in the first post.
Language: AS3
Libraries: Flixel
For coding I switch between FlashDevelop and SublimeText.
Making music I use main Logic Pro. Occasionally Reason.

Yep.
At this rate, it’s very possible that there’ll be no “art” by time Monday rolls around. But there should be a game and a good deal of music!

Song of the day: Spiel mit dem Feuer (Piano version) by Saltatio Mortis (Sorry, no link for this one.)

I’m open to taking questions about this design as it might help me solve some inevitable problems.

24/07:
Fixed that minimap issue.
Added enemies. Enough visual stuff. Onto combat and unit types.
RPG section can sit as it is for now.

…later…

Tired of doing visual stuff. Onto more enjoyable things like combat design.
Very basic combat at first. (Fight to the death) No real AI stuff yet.
Lot stuff I want to add if I get time or after the challenge.

We have combat! Combat is functioning. No one can die yet, but it’s there.
Have a bit of redesign to do in the morning.
Tomorrow evening, there should be a great deal of stuff done.
Looking good & on schedule at this rate. Started writing some music and narrative (which is a rather large component.)
A few tweaks today have also removed some things I wasn’t sure about before so that results in less work!

Progress GIF: Doesn’t look too different from yesterday but proof of combat “working”?

//My working
So, these updates may seem a bit odd.
This is due to me getting a couple of hours free to code in the morning and a few at night. Most of the day is gone.
I really get about 4 – 5 hours of time to code my entry a day.

Song of the day:Riding Cats Like a Boss by Jeff Ball

25/07:
Redesigned unit system. I was starting to go down a boolean filled hole, switched to states. All problems averted. We now even have ranged combat.
More back end things that have no visual change but make a huge difference.

..later..

Umm, I got some bad news so that slowed some more stuff down.
But I still managed to get resources working in a very basic capacity.
The mouse and sidebar now work together with command issuing.
Basic layout stuff for stats and whatnot.
If I added more friendly and enemy units, you could actually have a playable game here!

Have a screenshot:

Tomorrow is the day I don’t get much time at all to work on this so…things may slow down.
Sunday may be a bit crunchy…

//Challenges
I started designing this while keeping in mind that I want to stick with an MVC model.
It sort of is one, I break it a couple of times for laziness reasons but it’s still pretty on track.
That being said, I made some terrible flaws early on.

Song of the day: Black Holy by 小松未可子

Welp, I’m conceding defeat.
A huge draw bug has occurred.

Simply, units you can control live in an array. You have a dragbox to select them.
Once the dragbox falls over them, their respective select() method is called. This turns flips a boolean to true and changes their colour.
Simple.

For all units (except the final one) doing the select procedure calls the method select() but the colour does not change. You can actually issue individual commands to them still.
If you select the final unit in the array, all units are coloured but only the final one has the select() method called.
Bizarre…

I tested by creating a different way to select them (using the exact same methods) and it works. Reducing the population to 1 also works (the only unit is the end of the array.)
It seems like the dragbox doesn’t it EXCEPT that the select() methods on the units that should be selected is called at the correct times.

Painfully aggravating.

I’ve run about 10 different tests and I end up with the same issue so I’m thinking it’s a draw issue. Still, it could be something glaringly obvious.

So, that’s that.
Final screenshots
RPG Mode:(Ignore that minimap issue…)

RTS Mode:

As this will be my last game for quite sometime, this is most disheartening. But hey, in my 3rd attempt to make an RTS, this is by far the furthest I’ve gotten. A shame to be cut down by such a silly bug.

After the cut is me rambling on about the concept. (Which I actually rather enjoy.)

Okay. This all began with the idea of isolation.
You are an inhabitant in a town that has no connection to the outside. This had a couple of variations:

• The town was forced to be closed by a military-like force. Would have had patrolling guards. Also would have had recruitable units.
• The town had been cut-off for thousands of years but no-one ever dared to venture outside. Also would have had recruitable units.

The key difference between those two is the motive of the protagonist. The former is purely the protagonist’s yearning for freedom outside once again. The latter’s is the protagonist is tired of tradition and people’s contentedness to remain where they are without knowing anything of the world around them. (That last one sounds a little familiar but I came up with it before watching SNK.)

The former I thought was a goer for a little while. Little being the operative word here.
I started off using this concept and by day 2 (I think) I was very sick of it. Why? It wasn’t very good from a narrative stand-point.

So, I spent a little bit thinking again. I went back to the 2nd idea.
I then remembered I have a concept for something kinda similar but instead of physical walls, the walls lie in the protagonists mind and it’s a metaphor for learning how shitty the world is blah blah blah.
So I combined them.
And named it [eyknir].

So, I’ll describe how it goes in an procedural fashion:

• You start in RPG mode. You can talk to inhabitants of the town and learn their views. Eventually, you’ll speak to everyone and you’ll go to sleep.
• Next, in a subconcious state (dream or not…) you’ll have to do battle with various aspects of ones self in RTS mode. In your arsenal you have Confidence, Knowledge, Curiosity and Willpower. The enemy has Mediocrity, Tradition, Laziness and Subservience.
• There are resources, sort of. Energy and Motivation. Energy decreases over time and is halted by destroying an enemy. Motivation increases everytime an enemy is destroyed. Once Motivation reaches its max, you can build a new unit.
• After the RTS mode, you go back into RPG mode where the inhabitants speak in a slightly different tone. The colours of the town also change slightly.
• You talk to the people, do battle and so on, all the time the town is getting worse and the people are getting weird.
• If you lose, you return to a perpetual state of mediocrity.

So, that’s how [eyknir] goes.
It deals with ignorance, truth and perception.

The world is not always as we perceive it to be, but we strive to perceive it in a way where ignorance and truth can be balanced out. A total truth can be just as harmful as total ignorance.

Because I have to make all my games deep or something…
Fuck, I might find time to make a Twine game from this idea.