End of day 5

faassen on 2007/04/05 23:44 of Dam Builder

Let's lead in with our regular dambuilder screenshots:

What this shows are various new features:

• We got enemies. That is, birds and fishes that for some reason like to damage the dam you're trying to maintain. Only the birds succesfully damage the dam after today, but the fish will gain this capability tomorrow.
• There are various resources (trash items) floating in the water. You can go and get those and using a conversion device (we see it in the first screenshot at the bottom left, but it's probably going to change) you can transform this into the material you need.

Not visible are countless, countless tweaks.

Testing status: discipline of maintaining code has gone down as tweaking progress and I've been engaging in more hackery and copy & paste programming. The existing tests still work, but I've extended them little further today.

I do think they are still of value though. They helped me getting the core behavior of the game correct faster than I would have when looking at the screen each time, and they saved me several times as I broke stuff. Now that I'm programming enemy AI and tweaking gameplay, the scope for test-driven development is somewhat less, especially as I'm in an awful hurry. :)

Still, lots of cleanups can now be made. I hope to find time to clean this up after the contest, as the simulation currently has untapped (and not fully tested) potential, such as support for multiple dams.

Tomorrow I need to focus on the following things

• Game over when waterlevel on land is too high.
• High score screen
• Startup screen
• Fish should also create mayhem
• Windows installer. I aim to have at least a Linux source release and a windows download. We'll see how far I get, though.

If any time should remain, there are countless tweaks I still want to do. I don't expect to have a lot of time on saturday, so most of it will have to happen tomorrow.