I apologize for the long period of silence and I'll be working on making sure that doesn't happen agian.
But let me catch every one up on the Fleet Calamity game and what has been happening with Half Heart Games. Some time ago the programmer I was working with started to get overwhelmed with life and work, as many of us do. Over time he couldn't help as much as he would have liked and also ran into a few road blocks, which I couldn't help with. Ultimately he decided to take a break from Fleet Calamity and eventually left the team all together.
Don't worry though, we didn't have a big fight or anything. He simply had more important things to worry about such as family, work and life as a whole. I still think he is a great guy, and I look forward to see what he does in the future.
As for Half Heart as a team and Fleet Calamity as a game I have some good news!
I put out some more feelers and wanted ads for programmers and this time I made sure I got more than just one person to help. This time I also used a great site called Teamup and through them I found some amazing people. I got a bunch of people who replied to my ad, but I eventually went with two programmers who are both very smart, fun and excited to see this project through.
This time I also wanted at least 2 programmers so I wouldn't run into some of the issues I had before with just one programmer. Now if one of them has an issue and doesn't know how to resolve it they can ask the other and talk it out. I personally don't know much -if anything- about programming so I often couldn't help with technical issues. However, now the two programmers are able to fix issues almost as soon as they crop up.
Having more people on the team, especially when they live half way across the world, requires a lot of communication to ensure we are all on the same page. To this end we often communicate on Skype nearly daily just to check up on each other and see what we all are doing, whether it is development related or just to see how we all are doing. If a big topic comes up we will then schedule a meeting at a time where we all can attend and express our opinions.
So far this set up has been working very well and we are plugging along pretty quickly. Having two people help out also makes the development process much faster.
As of right now we don't have too much to actually show as we are currently starting the programming all over from the ground up. One of the programmers is setting up all the states and ensuring everything is talking with each other while the other builds up those scenes and prepares all the cards to be used, such as the deck editor, shuffling and dealing cards. Right now we are moving into the actual game play as all the back bones are set up and functioning.
Here is a gimps of what we have thus far.
Above is the temp main menu. As we move forward we'll implement more of the correct GUI and functions, but for now this allows us to navigate the game and get to what we need.
Above is the temp deck editor. Most of this scene is ready to go, but as you can see some of the gui elements are not positioned correctly. Again, this allows us to work with what we need to, but doesn't give us all the bells and whistles. Currently you can just move cards from the overall library and place them into your deck. You may also save decks and use them in the main game.
Lastly, above here is the starting of the main game. The menu before this allows the player to choose between a human or AI enemy (although AI won't be implemented for some time). It also allows you to choose your deck, name your opponent.
Like I said there isn't much visual content to show off as much of the work thus far has been behind the scenes, including setting up the team, getting the team all on one page, organizing the assets, getting version control up and running and of course programming the base of the game.
As we continue I will show off more of the game as it is built. I'll also share all the details of how we make decisions, solve problems and what we plan on doing next.
As I move forward I will attempt to update this blog weekly or bi-weekly depending on how much actually gets done.
Until then take care every one!
Make sure to join our facebook group @ https://www.facebook.com/FleetCalamity
and on Twitter @HalfHeartGames
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