The you and what army devblog continues here on tumblr.

Expect more short form updates as the game goes from crappy pre-alpha to less-crappy beta. Also, a playable version soon, so drop a line if you are hard core enough to be an alpha tester.

Also if somehow an amazing 8-bit artist is reading this and wants to help that'd be great. I even might have some money to spend.

It's nice when you can finally write a method called 'doActualGameStuff'. Only took about 2000+ lines of other javascript and python to get there...

This is how development of this game has gone:

1. Start designing game element X (Google App Engine, Javascript, CSS, etc)

2. Oh crap.. I don't know as much about X as I thought!

3. Learn lots about X

4. Code some more

5. Find a new X... repeat

So, javascript is more of a bitch to learn than I thought, but I've made a ton of progress on the back-end and 'guts' of the game engine. See also: gridmangler.js.

Unfortunately, as you can see... it still looks like shit! :)

But... slightly better than it did before!

So this game is shaping up not in the way I intended (neptune's pride + nethack + wordfeud) but I am really enjoying the new concept. More on that later.

For now, here is google app engine in action:

 'carlosthedwarf' has created a new game
(playing as the evil horde*)

Other players can see available games and join them

'joeyblogs' is going up against our friend carlos.
Don't ask me what a Mangler is.

So... there you go. Progress! Just in case someone has this blog set up in a dusty corner of their RSS reader. If I had a nickle for every game development blog that stops updating less than half-way through the project I would be a THOUSANDAIRE!

Moral of the story: if you are lurking, say hi! 

* I'm thinking more these guys than these guys.

I ported my A* pathfinding code from my 7DRL 2011 entry, GnomeSquad into "get ye axe".

Now that I have the channel code down, passing stuff back and forth between javascript and python is (relatively) simple.

Thanks to liberal debugging via Firefox and the firebug plug-in, I have working two-way communication from the browser to the app engine via the channel functionality. I have almost no idea how it works... but it does!

Mostly just for test purposes, I made the same map (in HTML5) click-able and it now dynamically updates (ajax style I guess?) the terrain type at the bottom of the page. Seems a bit slow but at this point I have not done any kind of optimization or testing so no surprises there.

Onwards!

Google app engine is fun.
JavaScript... not so much.

Here's what 'get ye axe' looks like so far. I'm trying to use the HTML5 canvas element for the front-end since I have no desire to learn flash.

Keep looking...

Not much to look at yet but actually further than I thought I would be at this point. The idea is that a lot of the path-finding and dungeon generation and field of view code that I made for AarrrRL and GnomeSquad will carry over quite easily to the new game. It's all in python!

Experimenting with google app engine, and using it to make a game.

The idea is to use this space as a devblog, and track the game through it's life-cycle. Judging from my previous gaming attempts, this life-cycle will be extremely short.

Here's the idea:

scribbly ye axe

It's sort of like the slow-form simple strategy (and backstabbing) of  Neptune's Pride...

Neptune's Pride

plus the dungeons and random potions and scrolls of nethack...

Nethack

plus multi-player tactical gameplay ala shining force, or x-com, or GnomeSquad?? (just throwing it out there!)

Shining Force 2

GnomeSquad

plus the asynchronous nature of mobile games like wordfeud...

Wordfeud

Plus... oh hey did I mention the backstabbing? Anyways, that's it for now. Hopefully this spot will show the game as it progresses from "back of a letter scribble" to "hey this is a cool game you can actually play". Wish me luck.