There have been a lot of changes with the game. The game itself has progressed considerably. The website is almost done. And Risujin’s gone to Stanford. So lets get started.

Game Changes

• Added Raoni + Aaron’s Galleon model (new ship)
• Made a (second version) trade UI. It works very well, and is simpler than before.
• “Boarding Combat” now works in-game. You can sail up to a ship and attack them. An X made of swords is drawn onto the game to represent the battle. The attacker has 2:3 odds against, and strength is measured in the amount of crew you carry.
• Simplified the resources system for 0.1 release. The only resources that are currently available are gold, iron, wood, crew, and food. The only way to get resources is to pick up randomly spawning floating crates.
• Resources can be used to build a new shipyard, which is used to produce more ships. The mechanics here are a bit sloppy, but work.
• There is a new server browser in game, and of course all the code that is needed to support the master list. This makes connecting to others very painless and does not required any knowledge of IPs. For the moment, though, the game does require servers to open a port in their routers/firewalls.
• Lots of new bugs, and lots of new bug fixes.

There are probably things I’m forgetting considering I don’t update this as often as I should. Regardless, there has been a fair bit of work done.

Website

I’ve been working on putting together a website for the 0.1 release. I’ve purchased the domain name plutocracy.ca. I’ve, for the moment, written the site in Python with some JavaScript. As usual, I’ve done all the art and code myself from a few cgtextures.com textures. I think it’s coming along rather nicely. Special thanks to cgtextures maintainers and contributors, as well as to the developer(s) of lightbox2, which I’ve used for the image gallery. I’ve enjoyed working on this site, and it’s mostly just lacking content now — though I could do a bit more work on the art too. There isn’t much to say about the site other than “go check it out and comment what you think either here, on IRC, or the newsgroup.”

Leadership Changes

Risujin has decided that he wants to focus on his school work, and, you know, make something out of his life. He’s done well for himself and is now attending Stanford to get his Masters’ Degree in Computer Science. I’m personally proud of him for the hard work he puts into his life and hobbies.

As a result, I’m now the only active founder and have taken full control of the project until (if) Risujin decides to come back and contribute again. So naturally, there will be a lot of changes to the way things are done and the code base. This, I think, is kind of normal for a new manager to do — make the work more his own. However, what we are now lacking is a programmer of Risujin’s talent and dedication. I’m very much welcoming new programmers to come out and prove themselves.

I should explain my (probable) plans thus far:

• Finish the website.
• Switch our revision control system to a privately hosted Git repository.
• Release 0.1 as it is with a call for developers.
• Review and “complete” the game design specifications.
• Forget about Mac/Windows support until such a time as we have developers willing to support these platforms. For the moment, it takes too much time to maintain these platforms, and no one on the current development team uses them.
• Probably split the game logic out from the engine.
• Embed Python into the game and use that for the game logic. This will make future development considerably faster and more accessible to less experienced developers.
• Probably research and implement Clutter Toolkit for the user interface. It’s a Gnome based library that will greatly simplify UI creation and maintenance. As a bonus, it already has Python bindings. The #clutter IRC channel informs me that integrating Clutter should be relatively simple and would more or less just require integrating it into the main loop. Some research will be needed here.

So that’s the plan so far. I’m pretty much going to dump 0.1 out into the world and get an announcement published to a bunch of Linux news sites with a call for developers. From there, we’ll agree on which route we want to take the game, but I strongly feel that using Python for the logic (as many for-sale games do) will make work considerably easier. Clutter also sounds like a godsend, and should not only make UI creation very simple, but also provides text support (I believe).

Apologies for the lack of images in this post. I wish myself and my few remaining developers luck for the upcoming year — it’ll really make or break this project.

– Andrei “Garoth” Thorp