Weekly Update (yet again)

Respond to "need more direction from PM comment":
Yes our team has not been the most organized bunch and it is almost just us picking what we want to do. It should change though since now we are more organized and the workloads (of individuals) are being decided by the team.


This week (or last Tuesday to be exact) we finally got ourselves organized and people were assigned clearly on what to do. The wiki that we have is a cool addition in our arsenal of tools to keep ourselves organized and several pages has been done/updated to remind us of what we need and our overall progress.

In the team meeting on Tuesday we eliminated a few units to keep a tighter leash on our scope and the environment doc has been updated to the point that numerical values of the effect can be inputted to prepare for implementation. There is however another set of terrain pieces that needs to be discussed first (the city ones).

The shooting system (2 out of 3) has been implemented and seems to be bug free. Both Stephen and I fried many brain cells over the weekend crushing bugs. One surprise gain from the troubleshooting was that I found a loophole in the infantry (normal gun) damage that allows it to deal many damage (and thus render the anti-tank ones somewhat useless). After the fix in the damage formula now 5 infantry units (with first strike) against 2 tanks(team2) will end with all infantry dead and 1 tank still standing with 58% hp.

This seems to be a good result of what we want to achieve as we don't want the normal infantry unit (also our only infantry unit in game) to be too versatile while still able to do some damage to tanks so tanks don't just steamroll them.

Next week:
Will discuss the supply system and fix global.elevation variable. And start implementing new units into the game while testing for balances. Lastly will talk about switching weapon mechanisms.

There weren't enough time to go over the supply system in the lab so will do so next week (it isn't discussed immediately because it is of less priority than other stuff).

The global.elevation variable was hard coded to 0 during a debugging session on Sunday to fix the shooting system (cause all grounds have the same elevation atm so less variables to worry = good). We will try to get that fixed so we won't be wondering why this thing doesn't work sometime down the road.

With the damage system in place all the addition of other units (minus the airplanes... they require much more work) so we can put in lots of units.

Another problem(or feature; as the 'problem' is how we implement that) that surface during the damage system implementation was how we should deal with units that got more than one weapon. Stephen thinks it should be better if the game mechanic will do the deciding of which weapon is better against what instead of the user doing the decision. I on the other hand has something more complex in mind... Guess we will just discuss it more on Tuesday (the problem/feature was first mentioned Sunday night during debugging so not much time to think over things).

/End

p.s. The team complimented on the docs I set up has enough info to become a full feature game =P
p.s. Can the TA/instructor that reads the blog post some feedback? I realize that there are ~77 blog posts and writing even a 1 sentence comment is 77 sentences long (enough for a good report) but it would help very much.