DRUG CAMP

drugcamp is farmfortress

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 23:50:54 +0200

drugcamp was renamed to farmfortress a couple of months ago.

0.60a closed out!

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 22:50:00 +0100

So, it seems 0.60a contains less bugs than the previous version which makes it an official release!

But beware, this release contains lots of reworked things on the server side, so really strange stuff can potentially happen.. Or it might just work better than anything we’ve put out there. We’ll see, but please tell us!

Really good progress on buying lives and upgrading to a larger level for real money (it’s just not enabled/visible yet..)
Chat was disabled after entering a camp via allies screen (use enter to chat)
Fixed a dangerous bug in the login that could cause interesting random disobedience.
Added particle effects when plants are fully grown or close to fully grown.
Added information about the current total amount of money held in the current harvest.
Wrong and hard to see color of low lives/ammo count fixed.
A player without any weapon now animates correctly.
A lot of refactoring in server side to improve stability and fix issues with higher player activity.
Fixed a bug that could cause a glitched list of camps to appear at wrong places in game.
Fixed a problem with server selector when a server in the list is down.
Fixed an overflow in camp ranking comparison, making it impossible to attack a high ranked camp.

Have fun!

Update 0.56a is out!

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:15:00 +0100

A new closed alpha build has been deployed. It will probably need all kinds of adjustments, but it’s fun!

Very loud music volume has been reduced. Finally!
New homing missile rocket sentries, dangerous AND fun
New plasma sentries (slow but high damage and high range)
Fixed old bug regarding all robots, shooting at a stationary robot sometimes had no effect
More adjustments to prices! Laser is now very expensive, plasma more affordable
Fixed a focus detection bug that could make the game go darker and darker
Better connection error reporting and game version check for server/client

As usual, let us know where the bugs are!

New update

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 22:11:00 +0100

Yay, I just pushed a new update. This might just break everything and make it more fun! I lost my camp due to experiments with the homing missile sentry..

Bandwidth reduction through more clever enemy update scheme.
New homing missile sentry that can shoot over any near by wall. I discovered serious bugs just after releasing it. They have be be fixed, so it’s not available just yet… :(
Hardened wall has a new look.
Dark floor has a new look.
Floor pieces and rails dont shatter as easy (survives multiple blasts, but not a nuke)
Adjustments to wave spawn to avoid stuck enemies.
Harvesting generally brings less money.
Sentries more expensive, but mid level sentry is better.
Weapons increased in price.
Ranking score generated from weapons are now ½ of the price.
Robot pause when sustaining heavy damage has been reduced/removed.
Attack waves do no longer have a fixed time between, next one starts directly after the last wave.

Small/large update

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 08:54:00 +0100

Hi there!

DRUG CAMP is always progressing somehow, even though I’m pretty bad at updating here. Last week I was kinda sick and had problems focusing on work. Still managed to get most of the GUI for repair/upgrade option running. You will be able to upgrade sentries and stuff pretty soon, but introducing this was more work than I anticipated. So right now, no upgrade scheme is implemented, only the GUI.

The game activity has begun to reduce slightly recent days, but this was pretty much expected. It’s interesting to see that it kept high for this long really, without any email notification system implemented. You will eventually receive optional email notifications when resurrected, attacked or even when the plant harvest reaches some threshold.

Last week I also needed to do some backend stuff that were pretty complicated to test and fix. I think it runs as it should now though, so I will release it discreetly this week and see how it flies. It mainly enables enemy waves to keep running in a camp without any players left. Don’t worry, they wont attack your camp on own initiative, for now. It should also fix quite a few bugs you encounter when trying to coop-defend a camp with other players, or just jumping into a camp with another player already in it. I may use this mechanic to later on trigger scheduled and notified attacks on camps that are very low in activity, basically trying to jump start them.

I’m also very keen on implementing a sentry that fires homing missiles. They will add a new level of fun when trying to raid someones camp.

Along with upgrades for camp defenses, we will implement special damages soon. Think freeze shots and poison shots.

The enemy waves are lacking in variety as well, we need to try and get more enemies in there. We have one big ass beetle and a smaller robot to write up code for, but they are far from finished right now. Producing interesting behavior for them takes a little testing and fiddling (not to mention a whole lot of debugging).

On a final geeky note, the game passed 60 thousand lines of code yesterday. Here’s what it looks like when I assemble it (the majority of this game is written in a custom assembly language for a minimalist virtual machine I invented some time ago):

(debug build)
start assembling from src/main.b on 23 Jan, 09:13:03
output image rs/pb.image
merging ... 173ms io (105 files 1262 KB src 188 KB inact, 60.0 KLOC)
indexing & parsing 52518 entries ...
compute offsets ...
565 strings pooled (17783 bytes) @ offset 320966
48528 instructions (@382 Ki/s).
634272 bytes written to rs/pb.image (1ms io)
done in 0.47s

The resulting image compresses to way under 100k. It’s odd (and awesome) having all my work to just implode to a binary blob the size of a tiny web page.

DRUG CAMP alpha update 3

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 21:13:00 +0100

So the alpha is going pretty good I think, people seem to be having fun despite pretty nasty bugs - that has to be a good sign!

We’re not that many players yet, somewhere just below 200, but their activity is surprisingly high and constant. Every day 20% of these users log in and play, and some are pretty darn good.

We’re not rich from this donation for invitation code idea yet, but we just passed 400 USD in donations! In relation to the poor traffic the site gets on average (~90 visits a day), I’d say this is pretty good! And you early supporters will not be forgotten, thanks for your support! Every time someone donates, it will be the most we’ve ever earned on a game of our own.

The trailer passed 3000 views pretty quick, I also finally passed that particular number in followers on twitter. Hello everybody!

So, a big update is heading your way. Here’s what’s in it, so far:

Forest grows back the way it was, unless you’ve built something there. Right now, after a camp has been left alone for 48 hours, realtime.
Floor pieces have increased in price, since now they have a function: stop the original forest from growing back.
Items, floor and railway pieces are now destroyed by blasts.
Radioactivity no longer stick to your base forever after a nuke.
Camp has 20 min cool down timer after attack, with 1 min wide open gap. You can’t attack the same camp over and over as much. Also it will increase the risk of running into other players that raid the same camp.
Ranking computation revised, not including money, only count bought stuff. Anything in the level is counted in now.
More adjustments of cash reward from killing enemies (hint: it’s less).
Sentries are no longer tree huggers; they will break them down to get you.
Put a cap on grenades (8 max) and nukes (3 max) to prevent bugs and mass destruction.
Slight increase energy of sentries (80,100,120) -> (100,120,140).
Removed giga nuke from shop since it will never be implemented. Sorry, but it was never meant for this game..
Added mines to design mode, both hidden and visible. Create your own minefield, but watch your step! A player can learn how to spot a hidden mine, but when chased by a swarm of bullets, it inevitably gets harder!
Rails are much cheaper, but can now be destroyed.
Mid level sentry increased range (from 200 to 300) and damage (from 10 to 15).
Fixed bug where flowers were being shown in wrong state or not updated when visiting/attacking a camp.
The old wall types are now a little stronger (150->200, 300->400).
Added hardened wall, more than double the strength of concrete.
Moon flower changed, now grows full in 15 minutes but rots after 16!
Grenades cheaper (500), nukes more costly (2500)
Pumple stays ripe a little shorter.
Sunfire grows full in 18 min.
Extra lives will now cost a lot more but only sell for 1/5.
Nukes deal much more damage per square.
New kind of robot that doesn’t stop when taking a hard hit and also carries a nuke…
Plugged a memory leak that caused instability in longer game sessions.
Fixed a very dangerous bug in the camp attack listing. I’m surprised the current version works at all, having this bug!

Basically, we want this to be a game about trying to run a drug farm, protecting it from attackers. Not just grinding down monsters to get money that you then sit on. Money is meant to be spent!

The new nuking robots are truly awful. They barge in, die eventually and destroy everything around them, poisoning the ground at the same time. Fortunately, they do not show up until you pass ranking score of 500 (that is 500.000 in the old score system).

I am probably able to release this tomorrow evening, that is in 24 hours from now.

Any of this seem horribly wrong to you, please tell us why!

Update 0.48a is out!

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 22:09:15 +0100

Just did an update. Main new thing are the nests. They make all the difference.. Other than that, it’s a round of bug fixes. Will start to focus on new stuff now, if nothing else serious enough surfaces.. Onward with the testing!

Added nests to attack waves, they spawn blobs and beetles. Watch out; they can appear anywhere on the level.
Reworked the flawed enemy spawn/update/death, it caused bugs all over, but it became very obvious with the introduction of nests.
Raised earned money from tougher robots some (+500)
Lowered money earned from red blobs (-25)
Fixed a bug causing sentries not to attack hostile players when owner is also online
Fixed a problem with a not firing bazooka, crashing, general disobedience
An attacker can no longer use the radar of the camp he is attacking
Fixed instability when forced out from shop or design mode, caused reverted level modifications
Fixed visitor having problems seeing his own player dot on the camp radar
Toggling sell/buy mode failed to restore correct state of menu (highlight, piece selection)
Automatic logout feature when retreating from an attack/visit has been removed.

Game update out!

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 21:28:00 +0100

We just deployed a full update for DRUG CAMP for you lucky bastards with an account, here are the biggest changes!

Get a little more money when killing robots now.
Fixed inventory related problem with owning just one weapon.
Fixed problems with sentry line of fire check, will not hit friendly targets.
Fixed graphical glitch, title of “buy” window now correctly reads “buy” instead of “attack”.
Fixed scrolling in design mode, can now be scrolled with ASWD as well as cursor keys.
Proper focus handling, game now detects loss of focus and fades out view.
Attack rank limit is now 25% of the rank, it used to be +/- 20000, should be easier to find camps to raid.
Count down text added in the buy screen to show the time to free resurrection.
A camp status line added, shows current rank, enemies, players and camp owner name.
Fixed provoke button click thorugh causing player to fire when pressing the button.
Bad click area on the no more clones screen.
Attempt to fix the instant constant firing bug when logging in.
Controls help screen added, shown after first login.

I aim to do releases much ofter than we’ve done so far, once a week would be real nice!

Status!

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 11:22:01 +0100

Hey and happy new year! I’m so long overdue for a status update.

The christmas and new years family related business has taken a lot of time (but was very nice!), and I’ve just been able to keep up email and manually granting invitation codes for donators (thanks- yet again!). Me and Dave had one dev day last friday and I got a lot of small fixes done. Also got a little dev time traveling back home yesterday due to train problems.

I’ll release an update today or in worst case tomorrow with what we have so far. It features mostly bug fixes (for example sentries do not fire each other anymore, ranking modification, more cash from robot kill) and a few smaller new stuff added. I’ll list them in detail soon.

Now we’re business as usual, or maybe even better, considering the surprising amount of donations in relation to the actual traffic (which was still pretty low) driven to the site.

We can now afford the hosting to run the game for at least a few months. Still, a salary wouldn’t hurt of course!

So, short term plans:

- Get out at least one bug fix/minor update release (very soon)

- Start on the next run of additions of new stuff to the game (released during january). I’ll go through them soon, promise.

- ???

- Actual profit!

Official trailer

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 21:19:00 +0100

Finally, our first official trailer (in all its glory at 1:1 scale)

quick private alpha update

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 23:30:00 +0100

The private alpha is coming together nicely, a lot of the testers have succeeded in activating accounts in DRUG CAMP. I will give it a week or so, and if not all people activate their invitations I will try and pull in more testers.

The game is behaving pretty ok with not too many dangerous bugs shown yet. There are a lot of glitches of course, but these will be fixed given time.

We are working on an official trailer for the game and its coming together real well. Once we got that, we can start doing a little more PR-work. We are also considering to let people donate to us in order to get into the closed alpha.

Some feedback from testers has reached us already and we’re looking forward to much more!

We’ll regroup and decide what part of the game to improve next in the following days.

update

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 23:23:00 +0100

Current status is really uplifting! I reckon this game is ready for private alpha in its current state, including server setup. It’s of course not finished or polished, but it’s very much playable and fun (but pretty unforgiving and unbalanced). So what’s left for me is actually mainly web coding for the invitation system and a way to distribute invitation codes to the private alpha group. I will also fix a few remaining bugs in order of their seriousness.

Our main goals with this private alpha is to analyze interest in the game, find a good and fun balance in the game play, gaining a better knowledge of the actual cost of running something like this and of course finding the serious bugs.

There will be no payments of any kind in the private alpha from the start. Buying optional lives will be introduced a bit later on when everything feels right and is less unstable..

I’m just gonna dump my pre private alpha fixes list and go back to ~~coding~~ sleep:

(on 21/12)

- Slowed down flower growth (~2x slower). Walls have been slightly weakened.

- Fixed click outside bugs in allied menu and attack menu.

- Fixed awful selection bug in allies menu.

- Introduced ranked attack, you can only attack camps that are within 10.000 +/- of your current rank.

(on 20/12)

- Multi server support deployed. Servers up in US and Sweden. A game picks the best by ping, but is redirected if the target camp is live somewhere else.

(on 18/12)

- Rearranged www, database and game server to prepare for private alpha. Game server is now a more powerful, but still running legacy hardware. Database is running on a separate (temporary) server.

(on 17/12)

- Walls are twice as strong as before, both brick and the good kind.

- Ranking calculation also includes the cash you have, besides weapons and plants. This affects the waves that will attack (and soon which player who can attack you), but may be broken at this point..

- Fixes regarding chat. Now works and even correct username shown when chatting.

- Fixes regarding allies system, invitations could not be sent.

- Sentries now have increased range, especially minigun and laser.

- New (non-coder art) graphics for the closed/disabled tent.

- Some minor price adjustments of build items.

(on 16/12)

- Fixed severe issue with level persitence causing multiple state of one level.

- Perm death screen does not appear for live players when one is perm dead.

- Interpolation bug in harvest money animation.

update 49

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 23:58:00 +0100

Bit late with this one, but here goes!

I’m really working through my TODO/Bug list nicely, and the game is feeling more and more solid (and fun!). Pretty much no major things left, and no dangerous or even serious bugs known right now!

I’ve lost track of fixes for the last week, but rest assured, there were many! We even managed to have a little feature creep and added different kinds of floor (does not do anything but look pretty) and you can also build oil barrels. These explode when damaged and can cause a quite lethal and cool domino explosion if placed right. A couple of new plants were added and regular trees can now be built and used as very cheap walls (or hacked down to grind up some rare loot).

To describe the game and it’s current state quickly:

It’s now a fun, creative and challenging online single player experience. Everything is nice and persistent so you can easily check up on the camp on any computer you are near. No saving or similar required, it just works.

You are ranked after how many plants (and their value) you are able to maintain and there is a ingame global top list to encourage attacks on the leader camps. If your own plants don’t grow quick enough for you, you can always raid another camp and steal their harvest. Waves of AI attacks are balanced after your rank, and can be provoked if you feel that you’re ready to handle the attack without extra waiting. You can add friends as allies and that will enable them to roam freely in your camp (regardless if you are online or not) and help you harvest, without being attacked by sentries.

But at any time, you may have to deal with visits from other drugcampers. You can also have friends online in your camp to help defend it, either from other real people or AI attacks. All these multiplayer things are surely pretty unbalanced right now (bullying and other abuse will occur..) but technically it should work ok and support up to 8 people in a camp (this game rests on a tried and tested multiplayer core). You are not able to easily coordinate an attack together with other people yet, but to manually attack the same camp is still possible.

Forest exploration and quests have been postponed for the next major update. We’ll probably start working on that after this version has left private alpha and we can handle payments. There’s still SO MUCH STUFF we want to add to this game, really hope we’re able to do this full time soon!

The majority of work left for me before the private alpha, is to get through the last TODO points (roughly 10 hours) and then set up a simple but functional site, where players can redeem their codes and start farming their own patch of land. Then I just need to set up a couple of servers and we’re good to go. After I’ve generated and sent out the codes to you testers.

As you know (and TV keeps telling us), x-mas is the time for miracles! Maybe there’s a way to make this happen :)

Aah, almost christmas!

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 13:07:00 +0100

Hello, here’s my contribution to the blogosphere for this week.

For the first time in a long (possibly first time ever for this project) the combined time of items on the TODO list is considerably less than the time that has been estimated for bugs. Very soon we only have bugs left before private alpha..! Yay?!

With this week, we updated the allies screen to become more of a central place for visits and specific user attacks, as well as manage your allies. Other than that there’s a lot of minor fixing and repair going on, most of the items are very important before the private alpha.

I’m also reluctantly realizing that there’s some administrative coding to be done before the private alpha. I need to generate passwords (and possibly usernames) and cook something up that will email each player in the alpha. It’s obviously not rocket science (unlike the rest of this game), but will still eat up some time. Also, adding to this is some manual work concerning acquiring (i.e. renting) and setting up a couple of game servers + database server. Shouldn’t take very long either, but still. Finally, the estimated time for resolving the known bugs is also something I fear might slide (in either direction, but anyway).

So I no longer dare to say this project will be ready for the private alpha before christmas, but if it happens anyway that would be cool :) It’s certainly not impossible.. I’m still pretty satisfied with the estimated time this project has ended up requiring.

Don’t worry! We’re still very close to getting all of this together and having it stable enough for multiple players and servers.

weekly update - 47

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 17:47:00 +0100

Hey there, time for a quick update!

We’ve been busy, as always, and things are really going pretty good. The TODO-before the private alpha launch is now down to 24 hours, plus about 10 hours more for a few bugs. I can get about 15 hours done a good week, so with a little luck, we’re basically on time! I rule at time estimation :)

Alpha may still be on before this year ends!

Highlights of new stuff this week includes a radar tower. If you have at least one up and running in your camp, you get to see the nice radarview in top left corner. It’s super useful to determine where enemies are approaching from, and you feel really naked without it. Your only option without a radar is to try and listen where enemies come from, not very efficient.

Added a new kind of enemy, the beetle. It a quick, nasty little bugger that crawls around and shoots slime balls. The total enemy count is 8, counting sentries as an enemy. It’s not that much really, but I want the emphasis of the first versions of this game to be interaction between real players. When we add quests later on, more enemies will follow. This beetle character fills a gap between the slime blobs that are pretty easy to off, and the bigger robots that are just awful. Having the strongest robot charge at your camp is a really devastating experience. You’re gonna beg me to nerf it..

I’ve more or less decided to go for player.io and their PayVault for supporting any payments for the first real version. It will cost us a little, but since we get all sorts of payment providers ranging from Kongregate and SuperRewards to PayPal it’s probably gonna be worth it. Worst part of a player.io integration is that a downloadable standalone version will be a bit more work (unless I write it in C#) to be able to handle the payment API.

Also added a new kind of flower, Sunfire. It has the best yield but grows really slow. So we have three drugs/flowers to plant now, but I’d like to have many more. Also want stuff like plants that aid in defending the camp (think Plant vs. zombies ..)

week 46

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 23:01:00 +0100

I got the railway thing to transport sentries, it’s pretty cool! Sentries change direction when they meet or reach the end of a rail. If they reach a junction, they have a 25% chance changing direction. This results in pretty complex, slightly unpredictable behavior and makes cheap sentries cover a lot more ground. And makes the camp look a lot more alive.

I also spent a lot of time working on the design mode. Being able to buy stuff like rails introduced additional problems, since stuff you buy/sell now can reside in two different layers.

There are still a lot of stupid bugs in there, like being able to gain money by selling and buying stuff in certain pattern.. :O But its getting there. Adding things like info boxes to each item and other things to clarify a little.

Also, I got rid of the last piece of coder art when I implemented the new title screen. It was a real morale booster!

And about that private alpha we’re trying to reach…

We may or may not be able to make it before Christmas.. :/ Much depending on how fun and playable the game must be before I dare call it an alpha. But at the same time, there’s also a problem of testing stuff like this project. I tried to play 5 games in parallel a few hours ago to stress test the server and see how it behaves when overloaded (an 8 year old, single core laptop should overload easily- I thought).

I managed to control the games myself, but it’s close to the limit of what is possible for one person to do :) I also only had five test accounts prepared.. The server was no where near overloaded, it seemed to support at least the double amount of parallel games. Note that the amount of total players it would support depends on how many players share a game. When two or more players are in the same game instead of their own, they use a lot less resources.

Anyway, just to be clear; nobody should expect a fully awesome, almost finished game as the private alpha. Recent years, people tend to expect nearly fully functional and optimal products starting from alpha state. For example Gmail was alpha for many years while still being as usable as it is today (or even more usable, considering this recent layout change). And lets not even drag Minecraft into this..

What I do hope is that you private alpha people can help us test it so we can calculate a better estimate on how much it will cost us to run it, discover the potential in the concept and help us out by supplying cool ideas for it!

45

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 22:55:00 +0100

Last session we worked on implementing the improved stuff in the design mode, as planned. It all went pretty smoothly. We also decided to throw in the railway thing, and so we did. The new stuff is the panel with all different pieces, enabling you to build complex stuff with manual-mode and sketch up larger structures in auto-mode. The buttons at the bottom are new as well. The info has not yet been properly implemented, but sell and buy work well - as do exit (luckily).

And it looks like this ingame:

It also adds a new mode that makes it easy to revert stuff by selling it. In sell mode, you just click and drag over anything you’ve built and it will be sold immediately. You can sell things in buy mode as well, but then you need to single click each tile while having that kind of block selected. Sell mode just sells anything right away. B.t.w., you get all money back when selling something (right now, even if it’s damaged). Stuff you build is instant, no need to wait for stuff or “PAY 5$ TO FINISH NOW”.

The railway will enable sentries (and other stuff later on) to move, they will move around according to some clever logic that has not been devised yet. But having moving sentries is real good if you place them with a little thought, they can cover a lot more ground in addition to be harder to hit. Also, stepping on a railway hurts enemies as well.

week 44, update

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 11:08:00 +0100

Oh, I forgot to update! I was ill last week, so I couldn’t force myself to any super impressive progress. But I did manage to fix quite a few and serious bugs at least, so that’s good and all.

I also added team awareness, so that if you visit the camp of an allied, his defenses won’t attack you. But right now, the only way to get into another camp is to “attack” it from the list. Maybe should be some kind of visit button as well, since the attack list is just a random selection of other camps.

Some progress was done to keeping a top ranking camp list. Its not presented in the game yet, but all the data is kept up to date in the database. Rank is right now basically how many and expensive plants you’ve managed to place and what weapons you’ve bought. The camps that made it to the top list can be attacked by anyone, regardless of their rank. Other camps require you to be in about the same level of rank to be able to see/attack them.

This is by far the most complex game project I’ve ever set out to do, professionally or privately. It’s very challenging, sometimes feels pretty overwhelming, but most of the time it’s also real fun! Just hope that you guys can help us turn it into a fun game as well.

Update, week XLIII

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 23:47:00 +0100

Last two-day session was much about stringing together the social stuff and gui. Also did some changes to the low level tiling engine enabling it to support going out of bounds and not drawing crap, this was very needed in the design mode since it could be hard to reach stuff that other controls overlaying the map.

Also bugs, horrible bugs. Managed to fix them all for now, but I’d be pretty disappoint if that were the last of them..

We decided a little more work was needed in the design-mode to make it easier to get the results you want. After settling for a new design, these added about 15 hours to the TODO list (which after that is saying 39 hours left).

Right now the only way of building continuous walls is to draw them right up and down, that takes care of selecting correct corner and junction pieces automatically. But it messes up some complex cases that are hard or impossible to get perfect with just one drag operation. You can remedy that by redoing a small part of the drag operation to emphasize what results you were looking for, but even this has problems in a few cases and can also be a bit cumbersome.

Now we are adding a detailed piece selection box for any wall type so its easy to pick exactly the tile you need, or just hammer it out with the auto mode. That should be flexible and fun to use for any one.

Also planning to add a few badly needed control buttons in the bottom of the design mode.

Here’s a mock up of that, and you can see that the map now can scroll outside the window.

TL;DR, here’s what my TODO list contains right now;

A simple pre-attack lobby where the attackers can be placed to spawn at different flanks (collecting online allies prior to the attack is done by just gathering them in your camp)
Implement teams fully. Right now it does not make much sense to become an allied.. There is already team support in there, it’s just not connected to the allies stuff just yet.
Code the new elements of the design mode.
Lock down stuff that’s not working good enough for first release, this mainly means the forest exploration part (which even later on will contain the quests) and disabling options in the tent menu.
Implement the new updated title screen.

My throughput of hours seems pretty good, in the past 5 weeks I’ve completed 80 hours of my planned TODO work on drug camp. But my idea of what work needs to be done is less impressive, as I keep adding to the list. Planning too much sucks :D In reality, planning usually falls apart when you start to get real and put it in code anyway.. And coding is fun (especially in your own VM).

Update, week 42

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 20:00:00 +0200

Thursday and Friday this past week was mostly implementing more GUI related things. After a little more work on the invitation/allies thing it lists all users who you’ve sent invitations to and those that have accepted and become allies. Dave put together a better design for that view, which will be implemented soon.

I also added the event history list. It’s a list of recent activity regarding your camp, shown when you log in. It can also be viewed from the tent menu (we added a button). The sort of events listed are stuff like received invitations, who has been attacking or visiting your camp, if it has suffered any attacks from the robots or maybe if you’ve missed out on an harvest. They will probably be sent out as email as well.

Also spent way to many hours implementing a proper scrollbar that can be used anywhere in the game. The shop already had a working scrollbar, but it was to much of a hack to move around. This new one is turning out better and can scroll most any things and skins easily.

Weeks are passing very fast! Still hoping to be able to kick off that alpha before this year ends..