Game Development Status

It's been a while since I last updated this blog. Let me recap...no, that would take too long: let me sum up. Things were in an uproar at the office for most of the last month. A new head of IT came on board and there was some question whether my position would be eliminated. In order to deal with my rampant paranoia I began working hard on my MCAD certification. Things have since calmed down at the office to the point where I feel I dedicate more hours to the game.

July monthly effort was a total of 40 hours 39 minutes in 19 sessions.
August effort total to date 6 hours 24 minutes in 5 sessions. Yearly total 245 hours 22 minutes, give or take.

My most recent work on the game includes:

• Completed refactoring of the AI's artillery plotting code and the game exec's artillery fire execution code. As a result of this, the AI's artillery now plots and executes fire attacks.
• Added code to the AI movement plotting routines to place artillery in battery at the end of a move if there were enemy units in range and movement points remaining to do it.
• Fixed a few minor bugs.
• Added graphical markers in the form of medal icons to the Unit Info dialog to indicate leaders' special abilities.

Upcoming work includes:

• I have come up with a number of bugs in the past month. I will be addressing some of those in the next session or two as I come back up to speed.
• I will review the AI's cavalry charge plotting and execution code. This is the last remaining tactical building block.
• Chris has produced documents describing attack and defend doctrines for divisional level formations. Once AI cavalry charges are working, I will write code to implement these doctrines. Part of that effort will include giving some thought to making it easy to add new doctrinal schemes (formation/action combinations) to the game, along with a means of choosing among multiple doctrines.

As far as the schedule is concerned, I'd say we took a hit the last month. I feel renewed confidence that we will hit our alpha and beta milestone dates, but some of the slack has been lost.