Jan 09
Game in a Week, Day 3
Wow, what a day.
I should begin by saying that I’ve been ill today, and so didn’t go in to work. But that doesn’t mean that I had all day to play with Damsel; My head really hasn’t been very together for most of the day, so I suspect that writing code would have been a bit futile anyway. (And besides, I write games professionally for a living. Writing personal games during work hours would be just a wee bit unethical)
I did begin to feel better in the late afternoon, so I’ve spent a few hours on Damsel tonight. I don’t have nearly as much done as I would have hoped because I didn’t want to push myself, but I do have an initial screen (click the thumbnail, above), a Title screen menu (blatantly copy-and-pasted from the ‘Asteroids’ sample game included in the core VectorStorm release), and have the project all set up under source control. And I picked out a few pieces of music that I want to use. And that’s about it.
Now, I do want to mention that while I’m building Damsel in a private subversion repository right now, I’ll be putting the code and data somewhere public when I release the game on Sunday, for anybody who’d like to take a look at it. But do be aware that unlike VectorStorm, the Game in a Week things are written for speed of implementation, rather than for maintainability and clean design, so they might not be something you want to learn from or emulate. 
In the “changes that will roll back into VectorStorm” category.. in the Damsel copy of the VectorStorm engine, I added a comma, and both forward and backward double-quotes to the vsBuiltInFont, specifically to be used in the screen above. Those changes will eventually find their way back into the basic VectorStorm repository; all three are useful characters which I was surprised to discover weren’t already in there.
Anyhow, I’m hoping I’m feeling more together tomorrow, and can actually put together a real gameplay prototype. I’ll be worried about my ability to actually deliver a fun game on Sunday if I don’t have an initial version by the end of tomorrow.
