I’ll be doing an update daily until the game is released.

I’ll be honest – ODE really messed me up. It wasn’t just the wasted time; I also seemed to lose all my momentum on the project when I couldn’t get ODE working right. And then I started having problems with the terrain that I couldn’t seem to get completely right, etc…

But the good thing about working on a project like this is that there’s so many different things to do, if you get stuck on something you can just switch to something else. So last night I started working on the GUI.

GUI programming is technical and tedious but not really hard, so it’s a perfect change of pace. I’ve already got all the screens planned out and I almost have all the GUI elements added to my framework.

My framework supports four functional GUI elements:

Buttons – Working

Scrollbars – Not working yet

Radio Buttons – Working

Editable Textboxes – Not working yet

In addition, it supports three non-functional (decorative) elements:

Bitmaps

Panels (drawn boxes, either empty or filled)

Static Text Labels

All of these are working.

The great thing about this is that it’ll make the product look a lot more professional and complete…even though it isn’t 🙂

I am hoping to get the final two GUI elements implemented and all the GUI screens set up tonight, so that this weekend I can get back to the main gameplay programming.

I am so glad I bit the bullet on Planitia’s design. I’ve gotten so much stuff done since then.

The biggest problem I’ve got right now is that my terrain textures, frankly, suck. Anybody know of a site with good free terrain textures? None of my searches have turned up anything really usable, unfortunately.

EDIT: Thank you guys for the texture links. Maybe I can hack up something from something I find. Of course, part of the problem is that everybody is into photorealism for textures and I’m looking for something a bit lighter and more fantasy-ish.

In fact, if I had my druthers, Planitia would look exactly like this:

I guess it’s kind of silly to desire art direction when I’m not an artist, huh?

It looks like Planitia is going to end up playing a lot like Populous II.

Now, this is both a good and bad thing. It’s good because Populous II still rocks. It does pretty much everything I want Planitia to do. Finishing a map of Populous II takes about 15-30 minutes. You’ll be slinging god powers within the first five minutes of play and play is very interactive – there are no long stretches where you’re just waiting for something to happen (unless you want to win by casting Armageddon, which takes a lot of mana).

It’s bad because I didn’t want Planitia to feel like a direct ripoff of an existing game. The problem is that if I allow the user to raise, lower and flatten land as part of the game, that instantly makes Planitia a Populous clone because there are no other games that have the user raise, lower and flatten land as part of the game experience.

(Yes, the Sims and Simcity games have features where you raise and lower terrain, but that’s much more like using an editor than playing an actual game. And yes, there are games with deformable terrain, but you don’t have full control over it and typically can only destroy it like in the Worms games.)

So if my basic gameplay is raising and lowering land so that your people spread out faster and give you more mana and then using that mana to throw god powers on the enemy to mess him up…that’s Populous, end of story. And that’s what I want for Planitia. I guess I just need to come to grips with the fact that the game will effectively be a Populous…derivative.

Now, Planitia won’t be identical, of course. A heightfield means that I can actually implement some of the Populous god powers better than the Bullfrog guys could do back in The Day(tm). And I can also add some new god powers (like the meteor that I want so very very badly).

But I think the real way I’m going to be different is how I handle combat units. In Populous you turned walkers into knights and the knights would run off and automatically kill your enemies. I think turning a walker into a warrior, barbarian or archer in Planitia will cause them to come under your direct control. You will be simultaneously handling ground combat and god powers. Walkers that you turn into fighting units will no longer produce mana for you, so you have to be careful not to impact your mana generation too much by making too many fighters (since you do have a population cap). I’m also thinking about making it possible to spend mana to improve both how your walkers and your fighters work. You can spend mana to increase the amount of mana all your walkers generate, or spend mana to increase how quickly they create new walkers. You can also spend mana to upgrade your warriors, barbarians and archers. All of these upgrades will require very large amounts of mana – your max or close to it. Thus, you will be vulnerable after upgrading until it repleneshes.

Thus, you’ll have simple traditional RTS combat with earth-shattering god powers on top. Sort of like Age of Mythology…I always felt it hurt that game that you could only use god powers once (and notice that they changed that with the expansion, adding a bunch of lower-powered god powers that could be used multiple times).

I also intend to fix the most egregious problem I think Populous II had.

There were six “schools” of god powers in Populous II: Human, Nature, Earth, Fire, Air and Water. As you beat worlds in Populous II you’d get experience which you could apply to whatever school of god powers you wished.

That sounds good, but each of the thousand (!) worlds in Populous II put severe limits on which god powers you could use in that world. Before the game started it would show you which powers you could use and which you couldn’t, and if you’d spent all your experience to improve a school of powers that was banned on this world, then you had a serious problem. Thus, the smart thing was to improve all schools equally, ensuring you’d never excel at any of them. (Unless you found a cheat code that instantly made you perfect in all schools, of course.)

I like the idea of buying new god powers (or making existing ones more powerful) between worlds, so that stays. And in Planitia you will always be able to use whatever powers you’ve bought. Hmmm…schools of magic that have dominance/weakness mechanics sounds interesting, and could make it so that you might have a problem if you have specialized in a school that is weak against the school your opponent god is strong in, but that’s not nearly as bad as getting your best school banned outright like in Populous II.

Jeez, I don’t have much time left for this. I need to get busy.

It’s short, it’s simple, and it’s silent, but it shows what I’ve managed to get into the game.

I’m definitely starting to feel more hopeful about the project. I’ve still got a month…that might be enough time.

EDIT: So…nobody gets the reference?

EDIT: I guess it was too subtle. The line “Hold! What you are doing is wrong! Why do you do this thing?” is from Star Control 2.

This weekend turned out not to be conducive to working on Planitia at all…I got a little stuff done, but not nearly enough to do my trailer. Hopefully sometime next week.

Please don’t stop reading! I know there’s been a dearth of updates recently, but that’s because I’ve been focusing so heavily on Planitia. I really believe that the engine is coming together and will become an excellent platform for me to create content on in the future.

And I’m gonna put my money where my mouth is. I promise to post a new trailer of what the engine can do by midnight Sunday night…so stay tuned!

It’s weird, because I’ve frankly been working quite hard on the game for the last month…but if you were to start it up and play it, it would look and play almost exactly like the combat demo I released. And yet I’ve done so much…everything is event-driven now instead of being procedural, the input code is greatly cleaned up, and I’ve even started adding an interface for activating god powers (though there’s only one power right now – click the button, damage a unit). And I am integrating ODE into the game, which I’m hoping will give it all kinds of nifty properties.

So soon, very soon, probably by the end of March, the game should look and play much better.

But right this second I got nothin’.

So I’m on vacation until the 11th.

I like to take my vacations in March. For one thing, it lets me be off work for my birthday. For another, not many people tend to take time off in March (unless there’s an E3 push happening, but that’s not the case this year). And the weather is usually very nice.

Now, I don’t go anywhere on my vacations. I just stay home. I haven’t been on a trip in years. I’d like to fix that, but travel costs money I don’t have.

But this year I’m taking a Joss Whedon vacation. Joss Whedon tends to take vacations only when he’s starting up a new project. So A Joss Whedon vacation is when you stop working hard on what you’re currently working on so you can work hard on something else.

And of course, for me the “something else” is Planitia. I am really hoping to get monumental amounts of work done on it in these next nine days.

And one of those monumental things is multiplayer. The engine for Planitia has to be done by the end of March. No exceptions. I’m going to need all of April to make and tweak content – I will not allow Planitia to suffer the same fate as Inaria. It’s just got too much potential.

Therefore, if multiplayer isn’t working by the end of March, it’s cut. Indeed, anything that isn’t working by the end of March gets cut.

You can view my current task list on Planitia to see how I’m doing. And I’m hoping to release another alpha by the end of this week.