Six hours is a short amount of time to blog about, but I have to pause development of Paper Cowboys because the Photon Cloud service that powers the game's networking seems to be down right now. I won't be finishing the game this weekend (let alone releasing it).
Hour 37
Made some good progress on level 2: After studying some images on Google, I drew three box cars, a coal car, the engine and some tracks. Then I used them to begin building the train for level two. The next step is to get the enemies properly spawning on each kind of car, repeat some of the cars, then put the engine at the front. Then I need to create the boss whose main weapon will be dynamite.
Note to self: Need to be able to chat in a game, and Escape to the main menu....and add Escape to the control instructions while I'm at it....and the game over sequence...
Hour 38
This hour made me realize how small the horses are compared to the player characters riding them; oh well. I got all the cars created, the particle engine smoke stack set up, and the boss partly done. I need to replace his machine gun with dynamite in the next hour. If that goes smoothly enough, maybe I'll have time in the next hour to play test the whole sequence.
Hour 39
Spent much of the hour getting the dynamite to look passable. Then I did a local playthrough: it's short and redundant, but I didn't get bored with it too quickly because of all the bullets flying around. I'm happy that I was able to get level 2 laid out and single-player tested so quickly! I had enough spare time to start designing about the in-game menu. I wanted to do some two-player testing, but the Photon Network is down. I may just have to get my own Photon Server up if their service is this unreliable!
Hour 40
The Photon Cloud service is working again (must be an intermittent problem); so I took advantage of the moment by fixing a bug with syncing enemies between players. I also got made it so you can choose to host a private game w/ password and dictate the number of game players. After that, I got the in-game menu working, and made a little progress getting chat messages working.
Hour 41
I got in-game chat working; lost a bit of time trying to figure out issues where keystrokes were getting gobbled up (you'd have to hit enter twice to chat). I also finished the game over sequence; not much to write about, it just reads "Game Over" and has a quit button. Master clients can restart the game for everyone. I started looking into the proper way to do network level loading...this may be easy or hard depending on if I just "get it." Plans for level 3 are looking very bleak now; I still need to find and add all the sound effects after all that!
Hour 42
This has been a mostly frustrating hour. The Photon network Cloud service is up and down like a spring, and in the rare seconds it was up, I was having problems getting the library to properly handle level transitions as it gave me other strange error messages. At the last minute I made some big changes that I hope will work when the service is back up.
Hour 43
I give up on the networking bit for a while...in fact I may not have the game done this weekend. The Photon network cloud is outright down again, and I still don't have the scene transitions working. I invested most of the hour on getting the player and a few non-player sound effects set up. This makes me very glad that I didn't do level 3 first.
I'm now about half way through hour 44. Stay tuned for hours 44-48!
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