My Mantra Of Motivation

No more predictions when this game will be ready for public testing. My little baby has grown into beast large enough to involve extensive bug hunting when I make sweeping changes to its architecture. However, with any luck, the time for sweeping changes has passed, and I'll have a playable game soon.

That's been the mantra of my motivation: if I've wracked my brains and found myself unable to come up with something immediately cool, then just go for the easiest possible fix that would bring me closer to a playable game.

Surprisingly, this has made coming up with cool ideas much easier. I should have known: it's rarely the lack of ideas that stump me, but rather the excess of them, and the closer a game is to a finished product the less wiggle room there is for new concepts to overwhelm me. Most of my previous projects fell on the wayside simply because I couldn't decide what I'll be doing next, and writer's block is a great a motivation killer.

A Week's Progress Report In Subtitles

I like to name my backup archives after some of the main things I've added so I can keep them straight in my head. Here's a list of some of the headlines of the archives I've created over the past 7 days, along with what little I remember from those days:

• "Ripping Guts Out For Tri-Game Focus"
  
  This would be immediately after last week's announcement of having the three factions play differently (more about that later). I saved my old progress here just in case things went horribly, horribly wrong.
• "Terrans Feign Expansion"
  
  Where my game was previously just the Native hive and all its little workers swarming about, I've now added the Terrans to the map.
  
  This actually involved adding a mothership that would dispatch units that transfer things to and from the mothership out onto the map.
  
  Added several Terran units with rudimentary placeholder behavior.
• "Woah - Things Coming Together Fast"
  
  Figured out what the final Terran and Native victory conditions will be. The Terrans are still on-planet, but are represented as an off-map presence.
  
  The motherships were removed the map. Now those transports fly from off map.
  
  Refined the behavior of my Terran units quite a bit.
• "A Star Is In But Natives Are Super Dumb"
  
  That's right, I've actually added A* pathing. After dabbling with my own (not A* pathing) superproc, I decided to stop trying to reinvent the wheel and just translated the pseudo code in a good tutorial.
  
  Unfortunately the Natives were used to the old pathing method and now needed to be retooled. (They were weaving a number of strange patterns in the terrain. Perhaps they trying to communicate with me?)
  
  By this point, I've made it so that the natives digest nutrition (and starve when deprived of it).
• "Natives Smart Again, Infestation In, Hivespawn Become Workers"
  
  I re-purposed the the Native AI code (which is quite extensive) to the pathing algorithm correctly, adding a lot of special case support in the process.
  
  Worked out the kinks of my pathing code to include a 'dumb' pathing option for those longer stretches. I'm sure there's even more tweaks I can do, such as reusing A* pathing already done.
  
  I added a means to damage turfs and to infest turfs (by unintended imitation, Natives have something mildly similar to the StarCraft "creep").
  
  I figured out that just about everything I've done for the Native faction so far corresponds to the function of only one unit: the Worker, who is responsible for collecting and moving about nutrients. That's the bad news. The good news is that this one unit supports the entire faction's economy, so I can now make the rest of the units do interesting things instead.
  
  The proper timing of the actions are now working universally.
  
  Some cosmetic features make it in, like turf damage decals and spazzam's damage number support (which is excellent).

Overall, my brain has been growing actively under hours of programming practice, and I've a mild migraine to show for it. (Or perhaps that's caffeine withdrawal.)

The first major conflict is in: Natives vs. Starvation. The code is in place right now that the Natives may eventually cover the entire map to their protoplasmic goo... and that's their victory condition.

Next step will probably be Terrans vs. Environment. Now that my Natives are able to carve out a habitat for themselves, I'd like the Terrans to be able to do the same.

Then, the epic clash of Terrans vs. Natives. Though they'll fight on their own just by the necessity of each others' respective existences, it will take the interactions of players on either side to tip the scale. That's where it stops being a simulation and starts being a game.

Finally, now that we've got an epic battle between the Terrans and Natives raging, we add our trump card: the Independents. These are the Vehicle Wars in the prototype title - customized vehicles built for reaping havoc: perfect for the player who doesn't play well with others.