Hammer of Code

I’ve done it! I’ve rounded out my ruleset and implemented the last of the remaining critical functions required for a basic game. As it stands any number of players can partake in a game of Risk and perform attack moves, friendly moves, colonization moves and reinforcements. Those features all combined together equal a simple game of Risk. I was actually shocked at how quickly things came together. I have had to drop a few features I would have really liked, particularly drawing lines for adjacency, and postpone some other ones, such as bidding on empty planet’s, it is my opinion that having a basic ruleset at such an early time will give me a lot of time to refine on what I have. I know already there are a lot of little bigs to be worked out, and I don’t have any illusions to how much time I will be spending debugging, but it is hard to ignore the fact that I will have a lot of time to “upgrade” what I have to be something more. Being that I have a basic, yet buggy ruleset running at this point in time it is pertinent to reevaluate my scheduling for this term and the next.

I’d like to commit the remainder of the term to debugging and refining the existing basic ruleset. I’d like to see a relatively bug free ruleset by the time midterms roll around. As for extending the ruleset, I can imagine many tweaks to the game mechanics will occur in the next few weeks; Particularly the improvement of attack movements (conflict resolution, odds, etc.) I’ve already run into a few places where I’m not sure which mechanic is the best. I think it is my job as a developer to think long and hard about these mechanics, and pick what the best option is. Another important thing to note is I COULD turn “unsure” mechanics into options, and simply set the default as the most sensible mechanic.

As for the rest of my summer: Once a bug-free and mechanically robust game is ready then work will begin on map importing. As it stands my intention is to create an XML-based specification to import maps with, and give the user the option to specify a map to use. Since I have never dealt with parsing XML it is unclear what sort of timeline will be required to implement a robust import system: I might expect 2-3 weeks to get things nailed down. For the remainder of my time with Thousand Parsec I would like to contribute to Ruleset Development documentation, create shell rulesets for new developers to start with more quickly, learn as much as I can about C++ and programming in general, and apply said newly acquired knowledge to improve my my existing code (in readability, usability, performance and security.) Of course a lot of the scheduling for the last term will depend on what I exit the first term with, and I will be sure to specify what is going to happen closer to that time.