Post GGC-thoughts

So GGC is now finally over. Despite technical issues and that the demo ghost was present for me during GGC, I was still able to show of what I made during this course.

Feedback on my game
I couple of people came over and tried my game at the Gotland Game Conference. One thing that many people said was that the game needed more polish and that the player should have gotten more feedback, but it is a good base to keep developing the game further with. And If I'm going to be honest, that's all fair feedback, these are certainly things that could improve with my game.

Beyond that, this GGC proved to me once again that you cannot satisfy everyone all the time, some people liked the game more then others. But overall, I get the feeling that the game is something that could be developed further.

Future plans
Because of what I got to hear about the game at GGC, I'm going to keep developing the game. I can't currently give an exact timeframe for all of this, but here are a couple of things that will happen with the game in the future.

• More feedback to the players. This was the thing that I got to hear the most of at GGC, and as a result this is something that will have high priority going forward with this project.
• Add the missing mechanics. The GGC prototype does not contain all mechanics that i want to have in my game and I will keep developing 
• More units to the game. As of right now, you only have one unit that deals randomized damage values. This will change in the future, more units will be added to the game as time goes on.
• Improvements to the back-end code. Towards the end of this project, more and more of the code was done in a way that only enabled it to work at GGC, while not providing the possibility to expand the game later on. With new code, I will hopefully be able to add...
• ...Network Support. It's not an RTS game if you can't play it against another human player. I will work on adding network support to the game in order to make this happen. I will write another blog post later about my plans on this front are.

Final sprint for GGC

Next weeks is GGC, and I'm now on the last sprint for the prototype that will be shown at the GGC show floor.

And how far have I come with the prototype? Well, I'm basically done with it. All the systems are now functional and almost everything graphics related is implemented. The thing that is left for me to work on a fog-of-war system, add some particle effects, fix a few bugs, change a few numbers in the code, and then I'm ready to go.

Improving feedback
One thing that I got feedback on during the beta testing, which we had earlier this week, was that I need to give the players more feedback to what's going on within the game. I've been adding sound effect when the various units are in combat with each other. I've also made it is so that the unit that you currently have selected is rendered using different materials than the other units

New fog-of-war system
During this week, my teacher gave me a fog-of-war system that I could use in my game. And for most of the part, it was basically drag-and-drop to implement that system properly. The system worked in the way that the main camera was essentially all black, and then you put fog-of-war revelers on your game objects to show parts of the map.The system had one issue though. There was a hair-thin line between revealing to much and to little of the map. As a result, I decided to ditch that system and instead start working on another system. I can show more once I get the system to function properly.

Other improvements
I will also look into adding particle effects to the units when they are in combat. I will also fix the last few bugs that exists in the game. But other than that, the prototype is looking in good shape.

My programming journey at Gotland.

Lets write a blog post about programming as a variation to all my writings about game design.

Before I started studying at Gotland University (which was merged into Uppsala University earlier this summer), I had programmed in high-school for two years in Java. Among the things I wrote there was an Asteroids game, a game of the Swedish card game Vändåtta with network code (although you had to know the IP for that, so no MMO game) and a game where you where moving a ball towards your mouse and the primary goal was to kill other balls with it.

However at Gotland University, we was going to work with C++. Even though I know that Java is based on C++, I was still unsure of how things were going to go for me programming in C++. And it went a lot better than I expected. Aside from dynamic memory allocation and pointers, both languages are essentially the same with a few syntax differences and different names for methods.

At the end of my first semester, I had not only managed to learn a new programming language (C++), a new Integrated Development Environment (Visual Studio) and a new multimedia library (SDL), I had also managed to use those things to re-create the ball game I wrote in high-school (although with less features, as I had more time to do the initial game in high-school). By the end of next semester, I had managed to program in another new multimedia library (SFML) and learned lots of new things on the way there (mostly things that only programmers can appriciate, but that's another discussion).

There is two important reasons to as of why I learned so much so quickly. The first one is my motivation, I want to learn to program. There is always something to learn and there are always a million and one ways to improve the code that you've already written. The Game Design and Programming program was the best programming program I could find in Sweden (although Game Design is very interesting as well).

The second factor is that I had two really awesome teachers at Gotland University; Rikard Jaksch and Ted Wikman. Both of them where really good and helpful to me when I had those as teachers. Long story short, I don't think I could've asked for any better teachers to have during my first year at University. Once again big thanks to both of you.

So the next time you question that think among the lines of "I will never be able to learn something that quickly" I want to say this for you. You can achieve a lot more in short time than you might think as long as you are motivated to learn it. And it doesn't apply to just programming either, it applies to art, game design, music creation, cooking or just about anything else in life.