Good news, everyone – the walrus is now pretty much all done!

What is the walrus capable of, you might ask?

• Encouraging me to rewrite large portions of the game.
• Devouring me alive (Either he’s way too hard right now, or I’m simply a sucky player).
• Forcing me to implement proper interpolation.
• Moonwalking.

With all that in mind, there’s still a few kinks left to work out. For example, you can’t finish the game yet. I think this is a kinda crucial feature. There’s a bit of menu work left to do as well – mostly on that darned SHHQ page which will basically contain some basic account information as well as a link to the stats website. I hate menu coding.

Shouldn’t be too far away, now, despite all the massive delays. Sorry ’bout them, people.

Yeah, I couldn’t resist.

There’s now a Twitter feed for Seal Hunter over in the sidebar, which I will hopefully utilize to bring you more frequent – and also more brief – updates. At least being forced to stay beneath a certain message length will aid that sentiment.

On a different note, I’ve just finished a very painful albeit necessary switch to a new font rendering library (Glyph Keeper, for those inclined). I’ve yet to polish up the implementation of the new music library though, so buh. Should take me an hour or two to fix up, at some point.

‘Til next time. Or ’til next Tweet. Either!

Yeah, I know, I’ve been lazy come updating lately. Anyway! What has happened since last time?

• I’ve finished the game intro cinematic. Yes, there’s a whopping 60 second long intro cinematic, and it’s fairly awesome.
• I’ve rewritten the music player. I ran into some issues with AllegroOGG, so I’ve now switched over to irrKlang for music playback.
• I’ve attempted updating my network library to the latest version twice, and horribly failed in doing so because of some teething issues with a major new update to RakNet.
• I’ve added the Punt Gun. About time!
• I’ve worked on the statistics website and finished the experience system. Leveling up is awesome.
• I’ve made the master server send Rank/Unlock/Title data to the client upon logging in. While this sounds fairly innocent, I imagine it’ll make beta testing a lot easier come certain aspects, and it’ll allow for dynamic content updates, albeit in a very limited fashion.
• I’ve started school again. PlaygroundSquad is awesome, but it reduces my free time during the weeks to a whole 3 hours. Thus lack of motivation.

With all that behind, what’s left?

• The fucking walrus. Yeah, I still haven’t added this bad boy yet, but I’m in progress of doing so at the moment.
• Miscellaneous account statistics in the main menu. I love menu coding. So much. This would be stuff like a killcount. I’ll probably just end up tucking on a link to the statistics site though, because I really do prefer presenting data in HTML.

And that’s about it for now; until next time!

… And before you ask for a release date, I still don’t know. When it’s done.

… Yeah, I’m too lazy to come up with a proper post title this time, too.

There’s actually been some progress since last time, but sadly nothing that’s actually really easy to, uh, take a screenshot of and show off to the public. Most importantly, matches are now submitted to the master server and inserted into the main statistics database. That alone is a huge feature, now (almost!) all finished up.

In close relation to the submission of the statistics, they are also passed around amongst clients for the ugliest debriefing screen in the history of… uh, menu coding. Did I mention I hate menu coding? I think I did. As can be derived from the above screenshot, though, there’s still no functionality in place to track score – which is pretty much what is left to do. Plus adding the walrus, finally getting around to making the boss code not suck too hard, and fixing some minor bounty related bugs with explosives. And damn, I still need to add the Punt gun.

… I’m still lazy, okay? ;)

I’ve been slacking off quite badly as of late – at least compared to the amount of work I got done before the summer vacation – but what the hell, you can’t blame a man for wanting to play games rather than make ’em.

That being said, I have with the help of a fella named Cory managed to finish up the last of the sprite/strip related work which I swear to God is the most boring thing about this entire project. Basically, all the fancy animations have been imported properly from the original game now, so I don’t need to bother with those any longer.

So what’s done? I just finished adding the turtle enemy, which leaves the rather infamous final boss – more dirty code hacks will most surely follow in that particular bastard’s path. Parts of the internal bounty code has been rewritten, too.

But what’s left? For now: said endboss (aka the fiercest predator in the world!), statistics submission and validation of said data, some boss fight code improvements, a statistics menu in-game, and more importantly, a quick draft of the game balance with 3 and 4 players (for 1 and 2 players SH will match TSH’s structure).

I can’t give an estimate of how long all this will take, since I’d most likely end up disappointing you anyway. Let’s just say my motivation is dangerously close to zero for the time being, which makes me a very lazy coder. I’ll try to keep updates more frequent (maybe even – cough, cough – get a Twitter), but for now, this is just about everything I’ve done. I’m looking forward to the private beta testing as much as you guys probably do, but I don’t wish to give out a rather broken and unpolished prototype – even if it is, as aforementioned, merely for private testing.

‘Till next time.