As of the start of November, I’m devoting most of my work time to finishing Star Hammer.

Right now, I’m focusing on getting the missions implemented. They’ve been designed for some time, so it’s a matter now of creating the data files and scripts that are required by the game to bring the missions to life.  To this end, I’ve been working on a number of  tools to make it easier to build them. Here is a grab of the tool that lays the missions out. Not very pretty, but it’s a whole lot better than handcrafting XML!

Mission Tool

I’m also working out whether I want to use real-time or pre-rendered cutscenes. Cutscenes might not be the best description – I want to have short animations before and after a mission, just to set the scene, or show the results of the players awesomeness when they succeed. These will only last for a few seconds (well, maybe up to minutes, but certainly no longer). I’ve worked up a fair amount of a system to do cutscenes at runtime, however the problem with using it is generating the data to drive it.

To move an object (like a spaceship) from point A to point B needs the information about point A and point B be generated and stored somewhere. I could make a tool to do this, but I think that would take quite a while. If I go down the pre-rendered animations path, I can easily use a 3D program to position the objects in a scene and move them around – that’s what 3D programs are for!

Ideally, I’d like to use a 3D program to position everything and generate movement/animation data, but none of the programs I have have a scripting interface to allow me to export the data. (I’m open to suggestions, btw )

At the moment I’m erring towards pre-rendering. Although pre-rendered animations will be bigger (storage space wise), I think they’ll also look better.

Oh, if you’re interested in following day-to-day progress (and why wouldn’t you be???), feel free to subscribe to the Black Lab Games Twitter feed