Ahaha, I haven't posted anything for a while now... ^_^;;
As of now I've begun my very last semester of college this week: I'm only taking 6 hours this semester, so hopefully that'll be enough time for me to get the ball rolling with this game! My current target is to finish this game by October 6. Honestly, I'm not particularly good with deadlines, and my hope is to turn this game in to the Indie Game Festival (whose deadline is Oct. 17), so this earlier self-imposed deadline should help me meet the actual deadline!
I'm still working on the editor that'll be used in making the game itself. I have a fairly solid grasp on what the gameplay will be like: once I get the editor done, it'll be a matter of dropping in elements and balancing out gameplay. I'm fairly confident in the gameplay and its representation of the elements of discipline and diplomacy. To be honest, the code has gotten messy, and I've been agonizing over optimizing it. I think what I'll need to do is just reevaluate all of my classes, and then rewrite some of them from scratch again. Hopefully that shouldn't take too long, since I've solved the logic for most of the original classes!
Right now, I am participating in my very first Ludum Dare competition! The premise is, a bunch of crazy people converge online and set themselves on the insane task of individually making a complete game from scratch, including the art and music, within 48 hours! It's also fairly difficult to plan ahead, since a theme is randomly drawn and given at the start of the competition. The theme this time is evolution, which had me nervous at first, since it seemed so labor-intensive. Hmm, I think I have a pretty good idea for a game that I can reasonably craft within the timeframe, though. We'll see!
My idea is to have this crazy damsel that concocts a dungeon full of traps, and places herself at the end! You play the part of this damsel, piecing together the ultimate deathtrap. You then press start, to see a string of eager knights lunge headfirst into the dungeon in an attempt to reach you. Each knight has randomly generated stats: based on what knights make it past a trap, the next line of knights are affected, effectively 'evolving' the knights until one gets the stats needed to make it up to you successfully! There'll be a time constraint, meaning you would not want to make 'the hardest deathtrap possible,' as well as endings based on how awesome your knight-in-shining-armor turned out to be. Hmm, the hardest part will be the knight AI, and the editor for the deathtraps, if I manage to get to that. If I don't, though, I guess I'll just have the traps be randomly generated: I think I will though. The idea shouldn't be too graphics or sound heavy, so I should be able to focus mostly on the code. Wish me luck!
Also, here is a really early prototype of the editor I have now: none of the erase/flood-fill staples are implemented here, and the save is broken in this one: I'd give a link to my current one, but I switched to an AIR app a while ago, meaning you'd have to download and install and all that.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4072122/storage/IceGame2.swf
Basically it's a tile-maker: you use the sliders on the far right to make a color, drag-and-drop the color onto the palette, then draw as you wish on the grid.
