Progress has been a lot slower these past few days.  Sunday I has to do a bunch of stuff in the morning, had many interruptions  and distractions while I could have been working, and had other stuff to do that took a few hours in the evening.  Basically no progress.  Monday after work was pretty much the same, although a little bit of progress was made.  I now have the game connecting to a database, and sending information to it.  This will be used for best times, world records and that sort of tracking.  Tuesday not much progress was made by myself, but the website can now access the database and display a table of the laptimes, sorted to boot!

Today has been a slightly different story.  Progress isn’t blazing, but I have at least added a Message Box state, which will be used to tell the player that they are not connected to the database, and therefore any laptimes performed will not be shared, or rated.  Among many, many other uses.  The other day I didn’t put up screen shots of the main menu, but I will now – despite the same fugly look.

This is likely what it will remain like for the Alpha build, although perhaps I am wrong.  I know that over the course of development when I come to polish this screen, I plan on it looking something like the next screenshot.  Forgive my concept art skills.  Well actually, forgive the complete lack of any art skills!

My hopes are to have this screen animated, so it looks like the car is moving along.  The plan would likely be just moving the trees and clouds from right to left, while adding a subtle vibration to the car, perhaps tire rotation…  Something simple but active.  Anyways, I’m still trying to refactor and put together some simple UI classes so I can create other screens quickly.  Also, before I go too far I will need to stop and consider localization support for any text that gets built into the game.  It is best to do that sort of thing early, although I am going to attempt finding “universal” symbols/icons, and use those instead of text whenever possible.

I do wish I didn’t have a day job.  It is really holding back my potential progress, and really hurting me as far as my schedule is concerned.  I’m hoping to release something by the end of October, but I am not overly confident it will happen.  But here’s to hoping!

Well, I don’t have any screenshots to share tonight.  I could make one of the MainMenu, but really – not worth it.  Just take my word.  I do have drop-shadows on some text, which is pretty neat.  But besides that, it is extremely bland, rotten colors and just needs to be touched up during the next phase of the project.

Alpha is all about getting all the features finished and working, and the main menu is working.  Both keyboard (up,down,enter) and mouse (movement, left-click) selection support.  I wasn’t planning on starting the MainMenu and linking up a few other game-states (with no actual implementation yet), until later, but I made a mistake yesterday that I need to be aware of in the future; especially on this project with such limited time.

BlackBird’s Lesson:

I hope you can learn from my simple mistake; Don’t get caught up in things that don’t matter. Yesterday I was working on the editor, I got the track textured – looking a bit better now, and a handful of other little things.  But most of my time 3hrs or so, was spent on a specific tool.  It does have a use, but it also was a waste of time to spend more than 15 to 20 minutes on such a tool.  Yet I added all sorts of little features/behaviors to this tool and I must brag, it came out awesome.  But afterwards I realized that it didn’t do anything to the actual track.  It helps edit the track, but it doesn’t edit the track.

So I didn’t actually make much progress since the tool I added is just a nicety, and not a requirement.  I decided to take a step back from the editor tonight and start working on the gamestates for a change of pace.  I know a lot of you LD’ers are shooting for Oct 31st to release by, but I won’t be releasing until early to mid December at the absolute earliest.  Although, I will be completing Alpha by October 31st.  Any features not completed by that date, will effectively be cut from the project.

I expect it to take the full month of November to polish up the features, and reduce the bug count as much as possible before releasing.  This process will likely go into December, however after October 31st I can not, and will not, add any new features.  I promise I won’t.  (Hmm, will I?)

Well I’ve decided to make my own engine/framework, choosing DirectX for visuals and DirectSound for audio.  I understand this limits the current implementation of the framework to Windows only.  I take this path because of future plans in 2011 with this framework.  Beside, if I do find the need to port my “OctNovDec” project to other platforms, the framework does encapsulate all details; FileIO, Input, Audio, Visual, and  Timing.

So after getting my framework up and running on an extremely basic level, with a lot of fun whoop-de-doos, I have a splash screen.  Something I said I could do in “10 minutes” ended up taking “40 minutes” because I also made a simple sprite class.  My time estimations seem to lack truth…  Here is the splash screen, at least in concept.

A bit simple, but my best piece of art.

With that I do need to change my logo.  “Presents” must be removed or replaced;  I’ve thought of Studios, but it is just me.  I’ve thought of Games but that could be limiting – even if it is what I am focused on at these times.  I could leave it just BlackBird, but I’m not sure.  In any case, when I have a Main Menu, this will fade nicely into it.  So, this is what I achieved as of last night, October 1st.

Today I’ve got some simple sprite based font system working, a finite-state machine for different Game States, and now progressing to work on the editor.  May come back to edit.  Yay for my first actual post!