Thursday, April 5, 2012

Prototyping

I have not talked about my side project, Stellar Fortune, lately.  It is still alive and kicking, albeit it in a little different form.  The last time I posted about it, I had converted it to be entirely web-based discarding those pesky graphics. Now I have gone a bit further.

Since this is all still firm in the prototyping stage, I needed a more efficient way to develop it.  It turns out most of my time was being spent on interface development rather than shaking out the flaws with my game design.  As this is a hobby and my time is limited, that just wasn't going to work out in the long run.  So now I have a new plan.

1)  Offline, command line interface
2)  Online, database, command line interface
3)  Real interface, live

By using a command line interface, I can really concentrate on the game itself.  So far it has been going well, and progress has been made. I've been taking a lot of my web-based code and stripping it down to just the essentials.  Here is a peek at the agent detail information:

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--> agent info 3

Name: Xues Juterty
Status: Hired
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Skills

  Basic Starship Piloting

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Assets

  T1 Light Transport

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Cargo Capacity: 10 Tons (8 free)

Food            2

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If I ever get to Stage 3, and the project is worthwhile, I'll probably get a professional to do the interface.  This game would have a ton of data to be displayed, and I'd like it done right.  In the meantime though, I'll be plugging away at making sure the core game is fun.