As promised

Yep I had a good day today. I implemented by GPS idea which works even better than I thought. I managed to add several new vehicles to the shops, some new food items just to add interest based on some suggestions. To test out the 'MattNav' idea I also added a couple of locations. A country pub called the Happy Fox and a monastery full of monks from the order of the purple teapot. Don't even ask where that came from. I think it shows that I'm on medication at the moment!

The game is looking good at the moment. Perhaps I should add a few more locations and adventures (maybe some rocketry related ones) and then I will be ready to put the registration form live.

Talking about the registration form I am going to force that email addresses are confirmed by clicking a link before a user can log in. I also need to decide whether to let people have multiple characters in the game. I suspect that I'll limit it to one email address per character. I guess it reduces the potential for cheating.

Oh check out the website : http://www.rocketeer.org.uk !!! It's rocketastic.

After that shameless plug I'm going to sign off for tonight.

Matt

Ooops

I forgot to say the release day will probably be after I've made some of the major changes talked about in my previous post. As a target I will open the game to the outside world by next weekend.

Lack of progress

There has been a distinct lack of progress with the game over the past week. I make no excuses for it I'm just slack.

Well thats not quite true, I got distracted with other things like appointments. I also designed a website as a favour for someone which took up a little of my time.

The other sticking point was that I was stuck on a few difficult issues to resolve. I was unhappy with the current motorway system because it made adding new content (places to visit) very difficult. As I've pretty much finished of the starting location (rock city) I couldn't do them until I had figured out what to do.

I was writing an email when suddenly I had a brainwave. I decided that perhaps in the game you could have a SatNav system (called MattNav in the game). The player could select from all the places he could visit from a drop down box or something. As this would be database driven in theory it would only be a small database change to add new locations and adventures (simplistically). I wanted to add loads of little places you can have adventures in to get new items or XP points. I think adding these in will make the game more interesting and it will start to come alive.

Theres the theory anyway. I promise I'll work on the game lots next week to make up for it!

Guilty

I'm feeling a little it guilty today. I didn't work on the game yesterday. To make matters worse I spent most of today in the city so didn't get around to doing hardly anything to the game today.

I did manage to tweak the estimating altitudes routine - because the altitudes where just that little bit TOO predictable. I didn't think I was any good at maths but I think i'm doing pretty well, some the calculations in the game are quite complex (well for me anyway!).

Hopefully I'll get a lot done tomorrow to make up for my lack of progress. I plan to build the automated competition judging/auto messaging the players type thing in time for the first competition result on Sunday. If all goes well release day will be SUNDAY 6th November.

Rocketeer, Rocketry and rockets

Well today was a brilliant day. I got an awful lot done which I am very pleased about. The first thing to report is that my Halloween suprise is in place. The game will open up a new adventure at midnight tonight, which will allow the player to collect items which can be used for extra turns or money (with a halloween feel). I like to do this as it kinda adds interest to the game.

The biggest improvement to the game is probably the player to player (or admin to player) messaging system. For normal players it allows them to send messages to each other. For me it means I have a way of sending messages (plus items and credits) to people. The main reason for this was to make possible weekly and monthly rocket contests. By next week when the first prizes go out, I hope to have the system fully automated so the game will run itself.

The other small thing that I've done today was add a "flight log" to allow the player to see their history of launches (in the current month). This works on the same data as the compeitions so people can try to better their own records. I think later on I need to add more stats to the page, allow the player to view all of their data. Personal best altitude records which they can try to beat.

The more work I put in to the game the more I like it. I think my friends are in for a bit of a shock the next time they log in, because quite a lot has changed!

Well this is me, signing off for today.

Hmmm

Well today I had a good day productivity wise. I've gotten the launch code re-written so that it works properly with player made rockets (the better the components the better the rockets performance).

I've also added some non-gameplay features such as a "My Account" page which allows the player to change their password and email address. I've also added a forgotten password link to the login form. It's this type of thing which needed doing before I could release the game to the public.

I've also added an extra table to the database schema to store the results of each rocket flight. Only altitudes of successful flights are recorded. This is in preparatio for the weekly and monthly prizes. I think about having a weekly/monthly competition should increase interest and get a bit of inter player rivalry going. All in all a good idea. The difficult part is fitting this in with the rest of the game. I think I'll have to add some kind of flight journal which the player can access. I'll also probably have to implement some kind of inter player messaging system which can be used to send money and items. The reason is because my character is going to play the 'judge'. In reality it'll be a cron job set up, but the prize has to appear to come from someone.

OK well I'm going to sign off for now and go and watch CSI on the television.

Mission accomplished

Good morning blog readers!

It is a good morning because I have completed the task I set myself yesterday. When you launch a rocket it's performance is dependant on the parts used to build the rocket. Also the characters level plays a part as well (e.g. can get away more wiht using cheap parts). It's pretty funky to see how high your rockets go now.

It's also much more likely that a ready built rocket will fly much better and more predictably than one you have made yourself.

Last night I had a killer idea for a whole new area of the game and I'm dying to write it. However I think I should concentrate on getting the basics sorted. E.g. a character account page where players can change their password/email address. I think some kind of league tables would be incredibly cool. I thought about introducing some weekly/monthly prizes to the rocketeer who has achieved the highest altitude or launched the most rockets. I think that idea rocks.

The game is really coming along now. I think I'm going to be releasing it to the public very soon now. OK It's still nowhere near finished, but I can add content as people are playing it. To be honest I don't think I'm going to get a real feel for how the game is behaving until real people start playing it and feeding back.

Almost!

I almosted reached my objective for today which I set myself earlier this morning. However I did a lot of minor tweaking/bug fixes/feature enhancements which make up for it I think. You can now build rockets by selecting components which I think is pretty cool. Anyway 2 out of 3 aint bad really. ;)

I think all tomorrow I will abandon the idea of making engine mounts specific to a size. In my universe one engine mount will fit all engines (hell yeah!) This makes things a lot simpler. The only change I need is to make the game predict some kind of altitude (perhaps store in some kind of stats table so players can have altitude contents) based on the combined quality rating of the components. Also it would be good if the rockets chance of being recovered goes down when inferior parachutes/shock cords are used. It shouldn't take me too long tomorrow am when I come back with a fresh head.

I may change my mind about this later but my main concern is getting a playable game opened to the rocketry/general internet community. I'm sure that will be when the real work begins!

We'll thats me done for the night. I'm going to see whats on TV.

Good Morning

I'm having problems sleeping at the moment so I didn't have a very restful night. However my morning got better because I had a package arrive from Amazon. I think it's the first time Amazon have delivered an order to me before their delivery estimate (less than 24 hours since I actually placed the order). Very very cool. Now I have some new music to listen to when I'm working on the game.

I keep looking at the audit table to see if my friends have logged on to the game. The answer is always no. It's a bit of a shame because I've added lots of new content. Oh well, when they do log on next I'm sure they'll be pleased with the changes.

Today I've set myself an objective of finishing the build rocket code, changing the underlying database schema of how a rocket is stored and, of course change the rocket launching code so that the results following from a launch are dependant on howyou built your rocket. E.g. cheap cardoard fins will work less well than balsa wood fins etc. etc. It's a lot of work but I should have it all finished by tonight. I'll let you know how I got on later tonight.

Building a rocket through a browser

So far my game is looking quite good. You can launch rockets (although the outcome is based on simple probabilities at the moment), damage rockets, repair damaged rockets and buy engines/motors etc. You can also earn money, buy stuff, and pick up junk.

I even finally got around to building the code so a character can sort through the junk which hopefully will gain some useful bits and pieces (fins, rocket bodies etc.).

I had released that I had been putting off the work on the main core of the game (building rockets). How on earth do you simulate the building a rocket through an internet browser? Obviously I had to simlify things slightly.

I decided that the only way to go about it (that I could think of) was to define a whole load of the various parts as objects in the game (that can be bought or picked up). Each object would have a generic part type stored in the databsae (e.g. Rocket Body Tube, Nosecone, parachute etc. ) along with a rating (a simple 1-10 number which gave an indication of how good that part was). I fear I have over simplified things too much. To build a rocket you are presented with a diagram showing each component, and you can select each type of component to build (or partially build) a rocket.

The theory is, that when the rocket is launced, if a poor quality shock cord is used the more likely that the rocket wil suffer some kind of recovery problem, causing the rocket to be lost or damaged.

I'm sure I'll probably be flamed by a load of hardcore rocketry purists. It's very difficult getting the right kind of level. The aim of the project wasn't to simulate the ins and outs of rocketry, if we wanted that we'd build a rocket IRL (thats in real life by the way).

Hello and Welcome

Hello and Welcome to my blog!

Let me introduce myself. I'm Matt Bohan from Norwich, Norfolk, England. This is my first real attempt at a blog.

My latest project is writing an internet browser based multi user computer game. Having worked in the IT industry for over 10 years (most of which as a commercial systems developer) I thought I'd of found it fairly easy to do. I was wrong! Luckily it's been fun as well, but it's actually the hardest thing I've ever done.

I had better just give a quick introduction to the game I'm writing. It's called "Rocketeer" and it's a sort of multi-user adventure/sort of rpg but not quite. The game is based around my experiences of model rocketry. I'm part of a local group who don't take it too seriously. A lot of the ideas for the game are from real life experiences although a significant part of the game is made up. They always say that if you are going to write a game write it about something you are passionate about. I don't suppose my finished game will ever be a really sucessful, although a few people who are involved in rocketry may find it amusing.

Well I think I've written a fair amount for a first post. Thank you for reading my blog and I'll try to think of something insteresting to say about the game each day or so.