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.