Development Updates from Developers

[das_vicky]

Have a nice vacation..
17 APR 2011

Hello All, as we had hinted earlier, Das would be on vacation from 17th April to 24th April and 4th May to 9th May. Similarly Anand has his exams from 30th May onwards. So you can expect low activity from these guys during these respective periods. But it means at any point at least two people will be working.

So how is this going to affect the development cycle. The effect is NONE. Yes, it is none, because these holidays were accounted for while deciding on the deadlines etc. As mentioned earlier the foundation for scene manager is laid. Its in a working condition now. Yes of course there may be things that needs to be added to it in future, but its good as of now. Our next official meeting is on 1st May, by then I will be able to close Task C1 (Scene Manager) and Anand and Pradeep should be closing B2 and B3 ( Storyline, screen looks). That leaves us with tasks B4, C2-c4, T0-T4 and 8 months.

So even after 20 days of development everything looks smooth and on track.

–Core Team

[das_vicky]

02MAY2011

Hello All,

We continue to bring all relevant (and sometimes) irrelevant updates as we promised. This Month’s meeting that was supposed to happen on 8th May was shifted to 1st May as Das is on vacation from 4th May to 10th May. All our core members joined in the meeting where we discussed only the current status of the development so far.

We am proud to say that our Development is absolutely on track and we are making terrific progress. Though we are not mentioning the task numbers but all the tasks we had undertaken with Internal Deadline of 1st May has been completed by 1st May. We are now working on the biggest thing for the POC release – the 2D gameplay screen. As we had mentioned earlier this game is a combination of 2D and 3D game, so in order to achieve 40% feature complete in 2D for POC, we have started working on 2D Gameplay screen. Ofcourse there are some cool features regarding the 2D and 3D gameplay, but we have decided we won’t be bragging about it till we implement it in the Alpha release Time frame.

For this complete implementation of 2D gameplay screen, there are other things that needs to be done as well
1) Workable Implementation of Match Class
2) Workable Implementation of Tournament Class
3) Workable Implementation of Player Class
4) Workable implementation of AutoPlayEngine
5) Database of atleast 3 International Teams with 20 players each.
6) Game scenes like – Tounament Selection/Match Selection, Team Selection etc… leading to the 2D Game play screen.
7) Placeholder Textures for each of the Game Scenes
Creating and Fine tuning some Subtle animations

So all of these will be done simulateously. This game has already started taking shape, though the Textures, backgound etc…that we are using are for Dev purposes only, so that we can position game elements appropriately. The looks of the game would not be final look till Beta release but the feel would be. In about two months from now, we am certain, we should be able to release some teaser videos with 2D gameplay in action

–Core Team

[das_vicky]

14 MAY 2011

What the hell is going on? Are we back to being ignorant, being less focussed? The answer to this is ABSOLUTELY NOT. We have got multiple feedbacks that most users do not understand ( read as not interested) in too much Technicalities of the process or the game itself. So we thought of posting limited updates for some time and see how it goes.

As of now, work is progressing smoothly. In this whole week, Das has implemented some “Behind the scenes” stuff for Team Selection Scene, Playing11Selection Scene, Toss Scene and 2D gameplay scene. With these background stuff in place, now Das would work (along with Pradeep and Anand) on giving the 2DGameplay Scene its meat (its content). We are hoping we should be on verge of completing 70% of 2D Gameplay Scene by end of June, considering that staring first week of June Anand would be available to work on this too. That would be a significant milestone for our Development cycle because that would mean, we can squeeze in lot more stuff in POC release.

So things continue to look very good… for us, for you!!

[das_vicky]

23 MAY 2011

Hello All, Continuing with this new trend of updating once every 10 days(instead of every 2-3 days), here comes the update. Also please pardon me as me being a developer and doing the development work, I can only think of “updates” from a developer point of view.

So what have we done since the last blog? I would say a hell lot. Lots of code being written, lot of work done by Pradeep on creating 3D models. He has ensured to deliver great work with the minimum turnaround time. But wait…we were working on 2D gameplay screen right? Right, but without subtle 3D elements, the feel wouldn’t be nice. We have some gentle yet pleasing transitions during 2D game play. We have also spent almost 4 days planning out 1 specific model for the screen which is a key model in the 2D screen. We have discussed a lot about the Usability and accessibility of buttons and screens, so hopefully the results should show up when game releases

Now this game is also not built as a standalone game. Its being built on top of a game engine which is being built on top of XNA framework. So think of Game as a house. To build it, we need Doors, Bricks Wood panels etc.. We are also building the Doors, Bricks, Wood panels (read as game engine components).

During this 10 days, we wrote the basic HLSL code too, because our game would be using some cool effects, which is not possible without HLSL. Now in due course we would be improving on this HLSL code and adding lot more. We had always mentioned about easing out modifiability in the game, so some basic structures were built with that in mind.

With a lot more background code in place(the code that handles all processing etc..) and rate at which the weight of Foreground code(the code that makes things display, animate on screen) is increasing, I would dare say – we are extremely happy with the development progress.

[das_vicky]

06 JUN 2011

Hello All,

Hope everyone is doing well. The last couple of weeks had been very hectic and low on productivity. No, its not because I was busy on something else, because its very hard to find out own silly mistake and as a result of which , spent almost 3 days debugging a silly code mistake. But all was not bad, during those debugging session, found some places where I could improve performance.

Also added a dynamic loading page. What this means that we have a scene where we can plugin any draw code and have that display when you get those dreaded loading of assets. Yes its trivial, but we got to do it. Then I modularized lot of code. Did some major changes to the Custom model class now allowing to associate Lighting Material and Texture Materials to be associated with each mesh of Model and consequently change it anytime per mesh. Also added some more elements to the 2D Gameplay engine making the screen fill with life slowly and steadily.

Now this entire month is dedicated for the AI game engine. So time for lot of Mathematics and equations. GameAI Engine would consist of 4 DLLs. Completed the first one and successfully added test code and ran multiple tests and pretty satisfied with the results. So for this entire month, I will share some more mathematical equations. I am expecting to complete 1 and half modules more this month. Hope this goes on as its going.

Internally we were also discussing the possibility of buying 3rd party solutions for UI (Buttons, ListBox etc..). We would definitely like to build one of our own, but looking at the time constraint and me being the only programmer at this point, cannot afford to work on UI for POC release. So in case if any programmer is interested to create a skinnable UI framework for XNA, do let us know. we will more than happy to get you in our team.