You come across Luigi shivering in a corner, scared for his life in a haunted house full of ghosts. As Mario you triumphantly come to his rescue, and then Luigi hands over his hard earned star to you. This is all Luigi is, a shmuck who’s trying to be as big a hero as his brother, but ultimately fails and then gets bailed out by Mario. Or is there more to it? The more you play the more you see the relationship between the two and the horror Luigi is subject to. He begins traveling around the galaxies you’ve visted to find any stars you may have missed. Once he finds it he gets trapped in the galaxy until you come along to rescue him, at which point he once again hands over the star.

Anyone reading this who grew up with an older brother probably knows this sort of relationship all too well. Mario abuses Luigi, forcing him to work for him and assaulting him should he try to take credit for it. That’s why Luigi is so afraid, he doesn’t go through the same battles as Mario to get stars only to get scared once he’s gained the star, no, he’s just terrified to find out what Mario will do to him should he try to take the glory for himself, so he sits there in his corner, shivering and crying, waiting for Mario to come along and make his life just a little bit worse, star by star.

2. Get the user’s e-mail address and start sending them loads of e-mails. It doesn’t matter what it’s about really, just let them know things are happening. Have they clicked a link? Send them an e-mail and let them know they clicked a link. It shows you care about them.

3. Have annoying same-page pop-ups. Is it their first time visiting the page? Ask them to bookmark the page. Hell, if they click no remember that and ask them every time they log in if they’d like to bookmark the page. Modern browsers have no way of remembering what pages the user has visited before, so the only way they’ll remember to visit your site is if they have a bookmark.

4. Speak like some sort of simpleton. It shows you’re fun and non threatening. Stuff like “Oh hi, [username]! Welcome to our place, hope you don’t mind the mess!”, “Woops, looks like a goose got loose, please reload the page!” or “We haven’t seen you for a while, do you not love us anymore? ”

5. Ask the user to add their friends. Everything is more fun when everyone from the user’s address book is using it, so get them to give up their e-mail account details so you can send out e-mails to all of their contacts until they join in too!

Next was adding in degeneration to objects when employees use them, followed by the ability for janitors to repair them. That feature still needs tweaking to adjust how long they take to repair and how fast they degrade.

Finally, there was a massive problem with how the employees went about their duties. They spent a lot of time standing about even though they needed to work/sleep/eat/etc. so now they will always go and do those tasks as soon as they can or need to. So they stand about a lot less and seem a bit more realistic.

Other developments include a redesign for the graphics that looks good and is also easy for me to create, given my limited art skills. I’m also looking into re-working the GUI to keep things simple. The search bar is a nice idea but not exactly practical since there’s never really a lot that you need to filter through. The way details about employees and objects are presented is a bit limited as well, and require a bit too much explanation to understand and filtering them is awkward. So I plan on simplifying this as well.

Over the last number of weeks I’ve been getting lots of little bits and pieces done. The miners will now mine out the rooms that you want mined, there’s been fixes to path finding to make the game run better and loads of other little issues that needed fixing(for example clicking through the GUI when building rooms). Next you on the list of ‘thing to do’ is making equipment degrade over time, have janitors fix the equipment and finally have scientists research new objects. Looking at what has to be done by early May it seems like loads, but there’s lots of code in place that makes most of these problems a cinch so I’m confident about getting the game to the stage I want come the deadline. Graphics not included, because they’ll never be the way I want as long as I’m doing them.

What’s that? You don’t believe me? Well then feast your eys on this:

Look at them eat and sleep!

It’s mostly a modification of the old theme, but the text has been made much smaller, there’s lesss images used. There’s now a side bar with a list of the games I’ve worked on, links to some other sites and a list of the post categories, so navigation is much easier now as well. I added in a search box at the top right as well, in case you were wondering what that thing was. I’ll probably put a label above it later to make it more clear.

In Research Station Mars news, I finished off refactoring the code for employees and objects so that they could be sorted together. This means that sorting the draw order of he employees is now a cinch. The employees now randomly move around when they have nothing to do(currently that’s always) and I’ve made some improvements to load times by refatoring all of the GUI code. I’m back in college now so progress has slowed down a lot for the moment, I’ve got to write a technical report about the project so that’s taking up my time. However, next week I plan on getting the bit where the employees actually use the objects done. Most of the groundwork is already there for this so it’s not going to be too difficult.

~140 Employees

]]> http://seregrail7.com/?feed=rss2&p=79 0 http://seregrail7.com/?p=65 http://seregrail7.com/?p=65#comments Thu, 15 Jan 2009 11:00:43 +0000 Paul http://seregrail7.com/?p=65 This is the prototype release for college. You can download it below. A readme file is included.

Research Station Mars Prototype

Please leave me some feedback telling me what you like or don’t like.

I’m using a fancy way to display numbers that splits each number into it’s own box.

The numbers are stored as an image like the one above. In order to work out which image I need to use I have to find out what the value of each number is. For instance in 0213 I need to be able to know that the 3rd digit is 1.

To work out the value of a number that’s in the middle of other number modulation is essential, since we can use the remainder to learn the value. Here’s the formula I used:

1st digit: value/1000

2nd digit: (value%1000)/100

3rd digit: (value%100)/10

4th digit: value%10

The end result is this:

There’s some other checks for lower numbers, since if we want to display 400 in this way the method above will output 0000.