Making a Plan (S2W4)

This week was a nice change from last, as we managed to draw up a plan taking us to the end of the mid-term milestone.  We're planning on bringing this to PAX East in March.  An exciting and terrifying prospect for the project.  Luckily we're only showing off the local multiplayer, which so far is the most solid, testable element.  From a narrative perspective, we have a solid premise and some entertaining characters for players to encounter.  We've also drafted some world map concepts and narrowed down the number of missions necessary for the single-player to work.

From a technical perspective, I spent a while working on refactoring my old code and planning out kiosk mode.  Since we're planning to bring this to PAX, we'd like some version of kiosk mode to work by that time.  There are several approaches we could take.  One is to have AI play against each other, but I'm worried we won't get to that point in time.  Another is to play video, but we'd need Unity Pro to use MovieTextures and Bink requires licensing fees that we can't afford.  I'm still looking into it.  For refactoring, my old code was a grand, tangled mess that was a relic of a fast port from one codebase to another.  I want to clean it up so that single-player isn't a hacked-together version of multiplayer, but there's a bit of resistance to the idea.  In the short-run, leaving it as-is works well enough.  When we start getting into scripted events and more complicated pieces for single-player, having something more flexible will be crucial to getting content created faster.  If we have to clumsily hack every special event into the game, we're not coding it right, and I'd like to code it right if possible.