There wasn’t much progress in July. Between the July 4th holiday, the Steam summer sale, and buying a new home, I didn’t have as much free time as I’d have liked.
Goals for July
My goals for July were to get some work done on the AI and effects.
What got done?
Toward the end of the month, I finally got down to business and worked on ironing out some AI bugs. The AI won’t wait for you to claim any bitstreams in your territory anymore (though they still seem to think a while before deciding to do something else), and they’re slightly less likely to go totally brain-dead later in the game. I also fixed an annoying bug with structure placement.
I also started running into a bug where my UI texture atlas is being sent to the web player at a really low resolution, causing the entire UI to look blurry. For the time being, I’ve been testing using a Windows executable deployment, which is great because the game runs at 150 – 200 FPS as a native executable. And BattleGrid looks pretty good when it’s running silky smooth.
I also started thinking about some new ideas for the graphics, and while I doubt I’ll use them for this game, I might use the ideas in a future project. Here’s a shot of what I was working on:
What’s left?
AI Rewrite and Updates
I need to improve the AI a bit further, and there’s still the rewrite option open. I’m still not sure if I want to move to something else. Either way, the strategic AI is still pretty weak.
Effects
Same as before, I want to give some more life to everything.
Map Sharing
Still to-do, and tempted to scrap it entirely. I may just postpone it until post-release, since the editor is already working and players can make their own maps – they just won’t be able to share them.
Music
I’m starting to get some general ideas for the music, but I’m still stuck on the actual creation part.
Goals for August
Last month’s goals carry over into August – AI and effects. It’s going to take some epiphanies to figure out exactly how to handle the AI. I could make the AI smarter about picking and placing structures, but I’m not yet sure how to do that efficiently. Right now, structure placement is mostly random, aside from outposts.
The effects are a bit easier to get done, but they don’t feel final, so they’ll still need work until I find something I really like.