Week 4 This week, I started working on the taxi system in our game. It needs to do the following: be accessible at any time (or nearly anytime), give you a choice of places to go, bring you to the place that you choose, wait for you at the new place(back to being accessible). This may sound like a simple endeavor, and the different parts of it are for the most part. But trying to combine it all is not working…and some of the parts aren’t as easy as they sound. I can teleport the player. This is how the taxi will work…you choose your destination, and immediately get teleported there. No problem. I can make the taxi follow you around. Every turn, the game checks where the player is, and moves the taxi object to that place. Not a big deal. Showing the player a list of places to go…also not too hard. Instead of calling taxi, say “Where do you wanna go, kid? Uptown, Downtown, Lefttown, or Righttown?” This code will display the quoted text whenever the player calls the taxi. Again, this is easy. But then comes the last piece of the puzzle. Giving the player the list of options, and letting them choose one. I don’t have any idea how to accomplish this. I have been looking online like you wouldn’t believe, but to no avail. My next plan is to ask Dr. Howard, as he seems to know his way around Inform better than most people. I will keep attempting to figure out some sort of workaround, however. Hopefully I/we/somebody can figure something out. This week, we also got the SVN server started up, and are all getting used to how it works. This Taxi Test project is not being updated fully to the SVN, and I’m not sure why…I need to talk to Sean, and see what I am doing wrong. Once that is working, then other people can see if they have better luck/inform knowledge than I do about reading the player’s input. ALSO: we figured out Tanner’s Inform troubles. His inform program wasn’t opening at all, even after reinstalling. We fixed it though, by manually putting the correct folders in the proper places…Somehow, they got moved I guess. That’s about it for this week…hopefully next week, I can tell you about how we figured out the taxi system.

Week 3 This week, I did my work blocks on Saturday and Sunday. I spent the whole time trying to figure out a way to have checkpoints, per Sean’s request. The idea I had for accomplishing this was to force saves (behind the scenes) whenever a checkpoint was created. When the checkpoint was restored, the save could be reloaded. Upon further investigation, I could not find anything that would accomplish this as I first imagined. I did find, however, an inform extension that would do something similar. (You can look at it here.)I think this is what we need. This plugin, as far as I can understand, will allow tons of customization using the undo command. This includes, but is not limited to: not allowing the undo command, not allowing the undo command for certain actions (i.e. if you break a window, then you would not be able to rebuild it) and going back more than one action. This is what we want. If we could put a marker of some kind, or start counting turns after making a checkpoint, we could revert (undo) exactly to where we need to. The only problem that I foresee with this is it requires the world to be built before it can be tested. This may take a while to get used to. That is what I have done over this weekend. Over my next work blocks, I hope to practice using this extension/plugin and figure out how to make it bend to our will.

Week 2 Welcome back! This week, many much things were accomplished. I showed Sean how to do some number crunching in inform, by showing him my previous inform project that I have done. Beau managed to create a rough layout in inform of the various parts of the town. We managed to come up with names of several places, as well as some of the key locations as a team. We discussed several possible sanity effects, and had many laughs about the devious things we could do to the player (snowing in the summer at 5% sanity, warped day/night cycle at 30%, etc.) An assignment was given to come up with some npc characters, which includes their general description and a summary of the things they do around the town (where they hang out, where they can be found, etc). I watched “Sliding Doors” which was part of the inspiration for this game. I also plan to watch. I plan to watch another movie that is of similar inspiration for this game, but I can’t remember the name of it at the moment. Our team discussed the game design document, as well as different components that we would like to see implemented into the game. More consideration was given to the work schedule, and I am now quite positive that I will be doing my working on the weekend.

Week 1 My team, for future reference, includes Sean Taliaferro, Beau Dicus, Tanner Collins, and myself. Dr. Jeff Howard is also an honorary member who is helping us out, while leading his own group as well. Problems encountered during the first week were many. Scheduling was the main culprit, as all four of us on the team have different schedules. I was the main contender for the most difficult schedule, as 19 credits and 2 part time jobs (that must take place between 9 and 5) take up most of the week. Who knew. This problem was further complicated by the fact that one of my jobs has not been approved yet, and I don’t know the times that I will be working there for sure. We/I solved this problem by deciding to have all of my 2-hour work blocks on the weekends (2 on Saturday, 2 on Sunday). I installed Inform 7 on my machine, which may prove to be a vital step in the upcoming semester. In fact, I believe that this step will prove to be the most crucial step that I can do for the entire project. Sean showed me how to control the radio and music in inform, which I found to be extremely awesome. We discussed the game design documents, and started laying out stories and tasks on Trello. I am confused at the moment, however, as their appears to be 2 Trello boards for our game, one of which has only Sean and me, while the other contains everybody from the team (including Dr. Howard), but has none of the cards with our stories and tasks. Further investigation is required as to the necessity of both boards. Side note here. I believe I will be keeping these logs, and perhaps posting them on a blog or something. Again, further investigation is required.