New Look - The Sequel!

In an effort to keep things readable, I've decided to go with a lighter and more readable theme. I like it a lot, and I hope you guys do too. I found this one on deluxe blogger templates which I highly recommend you visit if you ever want to grab a great theme that will match whatever color/mood/personality you're looking for. Leave me a comment and let me know if you like this new theme or wish I had my old one back.

I also did away with the forced uniform lowercasing of all the words. I thought it looked stylistically cool, but in the end it didn't help readability, so I'm back to pleasing all the English teachers out there.

You should all check out Revision119's new website to keep up to date on "The Fall of E.V.I.L. Corp." We're going to try to build this game in such a way that you will actually be able to download and play the game on your own computer without a hitch. That is, if you own an Xbox controller... But who knows, maybe we'll add functionality for the keyboard as well. It's up to YOU! Leave me a comment if you are going to want to play this game and don't have a controller you can plug into your computer.

Tower Offense - Week 1

Because our first game design progress presentation will be held on Friday, I thought it would be helpful to make a list here of the things we have already completed or will (hopefully) by then.

(Mostly) Completed

• A resizable window displaying a canned test simulation
  
• The classes and interfaces composing our program organization
  
• The data structures and methods to fill them
  
• Textures including an empty field, paths in all directions, and one creep 
  
• The ability to draw a static background consisting of a field, a path, and towers
• The ability to draw dynamic elements such as moving creeps
• The AI to test path validity and generate new tower position
• The logic to move the creeps and to instruct the towers where to attack

Probable Upcoming

• Updated textures that will be of higher resolution and contain transparency
• Additional textures such as a tower and tertiary eye candy
• Prototypes for splash or game over screens
  
• Sound effects for menu interaction, game action, and possibly music for before/during/after game
• A prototype for the interactive menu

If I'm missing anything, let me know. Otherwise, I think we've done a solid amount of work for one week and I'm very optimistic about our vision for the final project. We'll try to make a release build every time we update our code, so you can access it directly from the SVN in the Release folder (download everything in the files in the left hierarchy menu) or by accessing our files at the Tower Offense Website. If you do download the game, let us know what you think!

Game Design

Team Members:

• Justin Kern - Viz/Art
  
• Drew Reagan - Programmer
  
• John Laky - Programmer
  
• Brett Hlavinka - Scope Creep

For our first project in the class, we are thinking of doing a reverse modification of Tower Defense. The idea is to have the computer control the placement and type of defenses and the user will draw the path and summon the creeps to hopefully make it to the goal state. The challenging task will be to make it so that there's never one perfect path through the state, but that some will be better than others. Think this or this, only with more defenses and more path options.

I think that once we have a concrete idea as to how this will work, it's going to turn out great. The biggest problem could end up being a lack of interactivity, so we may want to make it so that you can change the current path on-the-fly.