the art of Simon Jensen

Good day in SL.
Made the BombBots Group. Got the home bases disappearing like they’re supposed to when the player is killed.. granted the default stati is still 50% transparent and leads to some confusion. But that’s a Trivial Fix.

Big Big kudos to my friend Fina Deladda who was kind and generous enough to move and sell me her land so I now have 2048m of space to work with.. I still have ~400 prims to spare. (with 166 reserved for the bots and their effects)

In addition on a personal note I made a couple new friends and played the social butterfly for a while.. which is a nice change from looking at code.

Didnt get as much testing done as I would have liked, but I did get to test the new obstacles and they work well. However I am still unable to duplicate the seizing of the shieldbot that’s happened 3 times.

Well I was able to get the randomly placed obstacles appearing on the board yesterday. I must say that I think that it changes the game dynamic a good bit.

I also upgraded my tier and acquired some more land so the Prim limit for each bot is now 12. So I’ve not got room for a welcome area and such.

I hired Dreilex Eusebio to design some new bots for the individual sides after I saw the Insectile GunBot he whipped together yesterday in 10 minutes and even without final textures it’s wicked badass. I’m so excited to have each side have a different ‘style’. So far its looking like ‘Insectoid’, ‘Nuclear steampunk’, ‘Humanoid’, and possibly ‘Alien’ for each of the sides, but nothing is final yet. I’ll post a screenie as soon as I get the final textured version.

With the new obstacles in the game and i have 1 more feature to add, I plan on having another testing/tournament this weekend. I would also like to have a group formed where I can announce testing events.

So much to do and so little spare time.

That’s the big question isn’t it.

Where do I draw the line as being beyond the scope of the project, determine what features need to be put in and which ones won’t work?

So to begin, BombBots is a 1-4 player game set in the virtual world of Second Life. BombBots is a real-time strategic board game.

• Real-time in the sense that the game progresses regardless of player interaction.
• Strategic in the sense that the players have to plan ahead the behavior of their bots on the board and anticipate the behavior of the bots programmed by their opponents.
• Board game in that the gameplay arena is broken down into a distinct grid (like chess). Thus implying that time and space are broken down into a set of distinct absolutes for each game (turns or clicks, and X & Y locations)

How It’s Played: Each player has access to Bots, with the purpose of detonating a BombBot on one of the 3 vulnerable squares in front of the other players. Each Bot must be programmed before being created onto the game board. Once a Bot is on the game board it is autonomous and the player has no control over it anymore. Bots are not intelligent and will only perform their program, even if that program involves running into walls, bots, or other self destructive actions.

How It’s Managed: The game system, should be self contained and reqire no constant maintenance. The game system should be intelligent to recognize it’s state and reset itself in case of abandoned games, and or give passerbys the ability to cancel an abandoned game in progess. However the admin should have the ability to configure overarching play configurations. Such as, but not limited to, pay to play settings, house taking a cut, and sweetening the pot in case of tournaments.

Object & Scripting Autonomy: Game components are to be self contained and inter object communications are to be kept to a minimun and Objects shall be aware of the game state and functionality (such as extra listens, link messages etc) shall be deactivated when they’re not needed in order to limit world script load.

Development Criteria: Everything will be written for worst case conditions, ie high lag and latency, redundancy systems will be put in place to prevent lag clicking and missed server updates. Well to the best of the ability to do so in LSL.

Feedback & Testing: Feedback from testing is high priority. Find and tweak what maintains fun and enjoyment. If it’s not fun it’s a waste of time.

That’s a good start. Any feature and or change which does not pertain/enhance the core game or the enjoyment thereof needs to be examined in great detail before consideration.

OK so starting a dev journal in the middle of development may not be the brightest thing I’ve ever done… But as the scope of BombBots has grown and grown from beyond a simple little move across the board game to something with multiple unit types, and a whole slew of features and planned enhancments and changes I figure it’s about time to get organized.

So.. first things first.

Time to define the project and its goals.

Then the work list of things to do.

Complex tasks that require experimentation before implementation and the processes needed for that will be journalled here as well.