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Sunday, July 1, 2012 - 22:06

Well I'm back and excited for the competition. The google interview was fun but I did not get an internship, I'll try again for the summer.

So far I have re-styled the controls, added an intro menu plus basic perlin based terrain.

I plan to rewrite the game using crafty.js: http://craftyjs.com/

The current build is playable here: http://danieru.com/clonecity/

Tuesday, June 12, 2012 - 22:42

Spin up a ubuntu vm in virtualbox. Provided you do not need advanced graphics api access this should work for testing everything but performance.

Monday, June 11, 2012 - 23:10

Well it would appear that life has caught up with me. On friday a google recruiter got back to me about an internship application I sent in two weeks ago. Looks like I am going to be spending my free time over the next two weeks in my algo book before the interview.

Once that is done with I intend to give clonecity some proper attention. A fun html5 city builder is something I can get excited about.

Saturday, June 9, 2012 - 15:52

That could work. I think the messaging system could support that without much modification. It would also make i18n much easier. I will have to experiment on monday when I have some free time.

 

Saturday, June 9, 2012 - 11:37

If you are using the DOM then you can get hardware accelerated animation by using css animations. Something to consider if you are not using a canvas and smooth animation on mobile.

Saturday, June 9, 2012 - 11:32

Thank you very much, this is great feedback.

1. This is a very good point. I need to find an elegant way to express the economic model to the player without requiring they read any instructions.

One way I am thinking of doing it is to use the messaging system. When a house does not have work it will complain in a message. If a factory/shop does not have workers it will complain. Likewise if a shop does not have stock or customers then more messages.

Another way to signal to the player would be through stats. For instance an unemployment rate panel or a GDP panel. Even if the player is a six year old and does not know what the stats mean they will see the numbers and how they change. They should also notice that a high unemployment rate coincides with starving houses.

2. That is a good idea. I can also reduce the text size and the padding.

3. I'll change the background colour on the tax panel. I also have to add a polyfill since the html5 slider form is not supported in firefox.

4. You've guessed it right, the smily faces only relate to the tax rate. At present there is no effect on the game world. What I want to do after the economy rewrite is make happy-ness a attribute of each house. Houses will then occasionally send a message to show their happyness. Thus the global smile widget is a debugging hold over as is the demand panel.

On the topic of the demand panel: it is only useful to see the profit levels for the buildings which is nice for debugging but I will remove it in time.

Friday, June 8, 2012 - 23:00

Good news, the game is safe to play. Messages no longer spam the DOM. As well I have removed the cliff at the bottom of the screen. All it did was take up screen space.

Friday, June 8, 2012 - 00:00

I should warn potential players: I've just added a "We are going to go bankrupt" message which fires every game tick.

Thus it spams the DOM creating a new div every 100ms. Depending on how fast things are lossing money this could mean thousands of DOM elements. I expect this will crash mobile browsers and slow desktops. I need to add timeouts to the messaging system, just not tonight.

 

Thursday, June 7, 2012 - 22:35

The messages are done and fading. It turns out that css animations are very painful to debug. With that said I'm glad I slogged through it, I have been meaning to learn animations for a while.

The farms are added. They go bankrupt in record time which just goes to highlight that I need to rewrite the economy.I've attached an example of this from earlier.

I need to thank you again qubodup,  you may not think it was much to render it out in blender but I expect you saved me an hour or two. I have not used blender in years and I am sure they have changed the UI twice in that time.

Thursday, June 7, 2012 - 20:20

Bahaha! That's perfect.

I have a basic messaging system going. I need to style the messages then I'll add the farm plot. Today is my 'work on game' day.

I'll report back when I have both tasks done.

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