Subterranean Cartography

I’ve got one of those personalities that likes to check things off of a list, so looking at my project timeline as I go day by day through the first few pieces of actual engine development (as opposed to the month of tech-demo development we just exited) I’m already feeling good about the long term of the project.

Right now the timeline for game engine programming goes until March. That means that story script programming, planet maps, dialog trees, quests and so on will begin to be scripted (actually written in the game’s script language) in the second half of March. Until then, I’ll be writing down plot points, designing dialog trees and quests, all to be saved in a virtual binder (a real binder would get all damp and moldy in our underground offices) to be broken open like a time capsule in the second quarter of next year.

This year however, is all design and code and testing. Right now I’m working on the map system and mapmaking tools. By the end of the week we should have a fully functional map maker that allows us to lay down multiple layers of images, and save animations as well on the map surface. We will see how this goes, but I have high hopes for our map system.
Beyond that, there isn’t much to report at the moment. Eric continues to work on getting our sprites to look amazing. We are going with a hand drawn approach that I am very fond of and I think will give this game a nice unique look among the XNA games that are out there.
Well, that’s about all for now. Time to get back to building map making tools and spearing the rats that are trying to make their way up to eat my lunch.