For this short holiday week, there wasn't really much to talk about on the Battletech front. I'm fixing minor/safe bugs and waiting on QA to run my Dynamic enum through the ringer. But on the personal project front, I do have an announcement. I started working on a computerized port of Car Wars during my free time over the last couple of weeks and I'll be sharing my progress as I have interesting things to show. 

Notice/Disclaimer

Car Wars is a registered trademark of Steve Jackson Games, and the Car Wars logo is copyrighted by Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by SJ Games. This logo is used here in accordance with the SJ Games online policy. 

Computer Games based on SJ properties are prohibited so I'll never be able to release this project to the public (not even for free). It's just a fun personal project for myself and the most I'll be able to share is my experiences while working on it. In my pipe dream I'll get this into a cool enough state that SJ Games contacts me to publish the game. But what's more likely is a cease and desist letter. We'll just have to see how things go. Here's hoping. 

If you're interested in legit Car Wars products, I recommend Warehouse 23. It's what the Car Wars site links to and it seems a bit cheaper than DriveThru RPG
http://www.warehouse23.com/products/car-wars-deluxe-edition

Why Car Wars?

Steve Jackson's Car Wars was a game I fell in love with back in High School in the late 90's. I bought the deluxe edition and picked up any supplements I found at game stores and used book stores. It can be a little on the fiddly side - each turn is 1 second that is broken down into 5 phases. You move paper tokens around on a map an inch at a time performing maneuvers that affect how in-control your driver is. I love this kind of fiddly complexity but it isn't for everyone.

I was in college by the time I found anyone willing to play Car Wars and it wasn't nearly often enough for me. Twenty-five years later and I only have between five and ten played games to my name. I figure, the only way I'm going to get to play enough Car Wars to really scratch that itch is if I code the game myself so I can play vs. the AI.

I've been working on a Car Wars port off and on throughout the years. XNA, OpenGL, DirectX, etc. I never was skilled or dedicated enough to see the project through to the end. I'm hoping that's different now.  

This time, I'm going with Unity. There are still plenty of skills that I lack: modeling, animation, sound engineering, etc, (mainly content creation skills). But with the Unity Asset Store there are free and paid for assets that I'll be able to use without having to resort to "programmer art". Plus I've only mentioned this project in a couple of places and I already have an offer from a die-hard Car Wars fan to help out with some 3d Modeling and Animation. 

I guess we'll have to see how far I get with this attempt. I really just want to play some Car Wars.

Early Goals/Mission Statement

In my past attempts, I focused on the math and weird game mechanics for a typical Car Wars game. Getting a car token to move around on the screen, dropping a mine counter, detecting collisions, etc. This time, I want to focus on polish and all the last minute crap you have to do in order to transform your shitty prototype into an actual game. I also want to prioritize finishing a feature before starting a new one. I'm not sure if other developers are like this but here's what happens to me. In professional projects, my coding method works something like this - 1. Think about the problem 2. code something that works (hacky is okay) 3. refactor the hacky code into decent code (hacky rarely okay) 4. test the heck out of it 5. call the feature done and move on. 

In personal projects, I tend to execute steps 1 and 2, then skip straight to 5 so I can work on something else that's cool and exciting. Eventually my code becomes a mountain of technical debt and doing anything in the project becomes a nightmare. As the code base becomes more and more painful to work in, motivation becomes less and less until eventually I stop working on the project altogether. Not this time!

With these things in mind, I started my project with the Main Menu screen. It's not sexy but it's where every game starts and it's a simple problem to solve. It took longer to find the assets than to throw the code together. After I got the quit button working and some free music playing for the main menu, I realized I needed to give credit to the composer and provide a link to their asset. That meant a credits screen. Here's what I have so far.

Writing the credits screen, I used it as an excuse to code up a simple object pooler. Each line of text is its own text control that spawns in at the bottom and moves itself to the top of the screen and turns itself off. The object pooler reuses those items. It's overkill for such few items, but it's something I know I'll use in the future when spawning bullets and other high count items. 

Future Plans

What's the first thing that pops into your head when I say Car Wars? A gang of motorcycles swarming a big rig on a desolate stretch of highway? A half dozen vehicles shooting the heck out of each other in an arena battle? Two rival duelists starting a grudge in the middle of town? Well too bad. The first thing I'll be concentrating on is Pedestrians. 

Why pedestrians? For their basic mechanics, they are relatively simple. This will let me focus on the turn-based game state and let me get that working in a clean way. Once I get the basics down, there are tons of special case rules that I can dive into. Entering parked vehicles, picking up and moving obstacles, jumping onto moving vehicles, etc. 

Next time I'll be showing some pedestrians planning/exectuing their turn-based movement.

Personal Update

This weekend the family and I went camping at Green Lakes. The place was beautiful. We went hiking on a few trails, swam in the lake, and even rented kayaks. Of course with camping came grilling out and having smores so it was a good time. Expand the spoiler for some camping pics.

Links

Twitter Post: https://twitter.com/Eck314/status/1147966512818458625