Not much has been going on lately – high school finals and graduation and whatnot has stolen most of my time away and after about two years worth on working on this codebase I reached the point earlier this month when I felt way to fed up with it working with it. Not to worry though, I still fully intend to try and get a beta going during this summer, but it’s sadly looking more and more unlikely that it’ll be out before July as time goes on.

A big coding bottleneck that’s currently bringing my motivation down is the addition of unlockable ranks and statistics tracking – which gives me a reason to smoothly transition on to the second purpose of this post. What kind of statistics would you like to see tracked? I’ve all the obvious ones planned in, such as the most popular weapons (down to seeing exactly when and where a weapon is purchased the most), top scoring matches, match details, and quite a bit more.

Designing a database to hold all this isn’t the easiest task there is, and even though refactoring it will probably be inevitable at one point or another I’d like to ask you readers for any especially obscure statistics you’d like to see tracked so that they can be implemented on the database level straight away. Can be pretty much anything, so hit me with your ideas and I’ll see if they’re worth to consider for implementation. You can of course just post ‘em in the comments of this blog post, but remember that the forums are still lurking about, just waiting for your nimble fingers to type out topics in. Looking forward to ‘em.

Most work done on Seal Hunter lately has merely been about polishing the overall first impression of the game and making things a bit more logical. With a prototype version having been sent off to PlaygroundSquad as my work sample (and after doing some serious code crunching) I’m rather relieved and miscellaneous UI elements is all I’ve been working on lately.

As well as this bastard of a menu which was an utter pain to code. Or well, at least utterly boring.

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There hasn’t been anything exciting enough done lately to warrant a blog post, but I suppose showing some sort of life signs is a good thing. For a bit more personal stuff, my high school graduation is drawing closer, which means an excessive amount of school work – which includes a project report with full documentation on Seal Hunter. Yay! Boring as all hell.

Apart from being my graduation project, Seal Hunter is also going to be my work sample submission for a fancy Swedish games programming school; this means that the any progress made lately has gone into the possibility for the game to actually end – in other words, with the player losing. Yep, that’s right, this wasn’t implemented up until a few days ago. Procrastination is fun!

There’s also a bunch of very very boring network code to couple up with that, so I don’t feel overly motivated at the moment with the increasing workload of school also directly contribution towards that. Sorry for not being more detailed, and I’ll try to whip up something in order to show you soon enough!

Despite not being entirely finished up, I’d like to present two of the new weapons that are planned for Seal Hunter. Again, please do note that Seal Hunter is not finished by far and everything is still very prototype-y. What I’ll be showcasing in this post might be changed or removed entirely in the future, so please be considerate. ;-)

Anyhow, I’ll try to keep this short’n'sweet! To the right hand side, you can see the frag mines in action and this particular flavour being the proximity mine which explodes whenever a creature comes in contact with it. After planting the mine, there is a grace period before the mine will activate (this is to maintain a healthy game balance, as you might guess) and react to enemy contact.
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It’s been a while, so here’s a quick update on what little is being done (emphasis on little).

Right now there’s quite a bit of lobby <-> game communication that needs to be written, and I find this extremely boring. To put this in an easier fashion, I’m making the game servers record and submit game results to the account server – and progress with this is very slow. On a positive note though, clients that are connecting to a game sends their account identity which is then checked against the account server by the game host. Look at the screenshot to the right for further reference – you’re able to see the account #ID and account name of others in your game via the scoreboard. You can still choose any nickname you wish!
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