Excelsior jet application gallery and some progress

Excelsior jet have recently opened their application gallery. I got word today that I was approved for entering it. This sounds really good. Now I just have to finish demo 0.3.

I got a lot of things done today. Sometimes I really wish I had another quest model. Now any number of quests and plotlines can be active at the same time. So everytime a quest tries to script anything, it has to check: am I active, have I been completed? It becomes sort of like spaghetti code scattered over dialogs, triggers, lives and common scripts.

I would like to keep everything that belongs to a certain quest at one place. I think my next campaign will be more like grand theft auto. The world is at peace (apart from the player wreacking havoc on everything). But then the player starts a quest and it runs until is is complete or failed, then the world goes back to beeing at peace. Unfortunately this is not easy to do since my quests is almost always scattered over several maps that have very little shared scope. Well, I guess I will make it better in my next game.

Another thing, I have completed a small cms system for my homepage. Go check it out (I have posted some new screenshots and some music so it's worth some of your time). It is very simple, written in php. It was my first real project in php. I think it turned out pretty good. I solved the problem even if I want to add more features.

The reason for not using java? Well, it would have been easier to design something pretty in java, and it would have taken me the same time. But I would also have to connect tomcat and apache. It shouldn't be a problem but I want my server as bare as possible. Right now I only use flat files, that's right, not even mySQL. Very simple and very clean.

Instant action

I have found that while demonstrating the game, it took to long a time for the action to happen. Also, the weapons and enemies were kind of weak until far into the game. I wanted something fast, hard, instant action with lots of guns and enemies. A long forgotten item on my todo list has been instant action. Not so anymore.

I have started making a couple of levels for this purpose. No talk, no story, only combat. Also, I have made all eqiupment random. No two games will ever be the same. Well, at least there are a lot of different possibilities. While I played through the game a couple of times a few patterns emerges:

• Hightech weapons. You find a mk5, a teardrop zero or a Enforce shotgun. You buy a level of theory and you rock with the medium advanced weapons. Ammo is sparse so you have to rely on good aim and a careful planned tactic.
• Lowtech practical weapons. With the cult shotgun or flayer you have to work a little harder for the kills. Hopefully you have found an orbit or handflamer as backup.
• Impractical weapons. The lawmaster packs quite a punch but the rate of fire sucks and the clip is small. The big guys go down almost as fast as the small guys, beware of large packs of smaller enemies.
  
• Weird combinations. With only grenadelaunchers or only handflamers the game is odd to say the least. Ammo is very sparse so you have to run fast and maybe settle on not killing everything.
• Useless. You only find beer. At least you can get a little drunk before you die. :-)

0.3 closer

I made some promises about the version 0.3 beeing released after this weekend. It's not going to happen. With the split storyline and missions beeing heavy scripted it has been to much work getting everything together. Right now it's a mess, unique events repeat themselves etc.

But there has been some progress:

• There are three four new action levels (and one of them includes a very scary scripted scene).
• Numerous bugfixes.
• A couple of new guns, including the masterwork flayer and a sonic disruptor.
• The new Dodge action that can be used when you have bought the first level of Acrobat. The dodge skill improves with every level of Acrobat.

Stay tuned.