State of the Project

[mikeejimbo]

As a semi-official self-appointed speaker of states of things, I thought I'd discuss how the project is looking so far.

First of all, I'd like to discuss our staff. As far as programming goes, I may be the most experienced, although Ian may come close. However, Ian tells me that he doesn't know much Java. If we do get Andrew on the project, he will he a valuable asset because he knows Java even better than I do. Still, I believe I will be taking a sort of director's position as far as the technical aspects go, because in some ways this project is an ideological descendant of a project I did in school. But with graphics and fancier. Nick and the other Mike are beginning to experience themselves with Java which is good because we need Code Monkeys. You can think of me as Chief Code Monkey.

As far as the creative aspect goes, Nick will be directing most of that, which means he'll be working with the few talented people we actually have. You know, our artist and musician. If we actually have them on board, that is. He's also discussing the story with me at length, although I will be busy with a lot of the technical obstacles.

So here's how the project stands. Not a lot of work has been done on it yet. A little bit of prototyping has been done though, and then lost, and then re-done. A lot of Java Docs have been consulted. Next, I shall make a list of the hurdles to get around.

- Placing the graphics on the screen and such. This is very basic and I don't like it so I'm making Andrew do it.
- Coming up with a way to load all the information from files. This is key.
- Come up with a way to create new adventures easily. Now the trick here is to make some sort of encryption such that you cannot easily trade 'official' adventures, but still make trading custom adventures easy.
- Develop an easy-to-use adventure creator. Also key.

This is very, very high level and doesn't mention all the more minor problems. (Like figuring out how to provide minor bug updates without uploading the whole file again - though it'll be a small file anyway.) For example, my plan on encrypting the official and default adventure is to not do so at all. You'll be able to see exactly how we format it, which will lead to spoilers if you look at it before finishing the adventure. This is OK by me, because if you look at it after finishing the adventure you'll probably learn a lot about creating adventures by viewing these files.

Where are we going from here? Well finals are winding down for me, so soon I'll have a lot more free time to work on this. I also may be taking a job working in Java, which will also involve graphics, but to be honest that's a lot harder. Less actually put out in the end, and I'm not getting paid much, but more difficult. (It involves timing and threads and junk!) Even more woe, there's practically no overlap between the two, so working on one won't really improve or give me ideas for the other.

[MadMax]

I have setup on my webserver a bugtracking/project management tool currently setup for Black Sierra. If you want to use it assign work to the rest of the team I would more than happy to set up users and a EoW project for us to use.