Game design again

I’ve been doing some game design on PjW the last few days and still work a bit on it. That’s why I prefer doing games over other stuff (techdemos, engines), because it includes a lot of different things to do. It’s coding, game design, creating content (3D models and such) and much more. So if you’re tired of one part you just to something different that’s still related to the project.

And since the cording part of the game is already rather advanced, I decided to finally push myself to at least write down some content for the game. First on my book is the list of buildings for the game, and I already have over 30 different buildings written down and I project about 40 different buildings (some of whom need to be researched first) to make it into the final game. The buildings are divided into civil and military ones and besides that each nation will also have 2 exclusive buildings.

Why so many buildings? Because I want to “force” the player to make strategic decisions. You’ll only have nine building places in each region and so you have to really think about what buildings to construct in what region (your outer regions e.g. need more defensive stuff). So if there would only be a few buildings in the game, or if you would have unlimited building place, then there would be no decisions and the player would just build anything available. This is something that I didn’t want, and I hope the way I implemented this part of the gameplay makes PjW a bit more interesting to play.

And now to something completely different :

After over two yeas with my Athlon XP2600+ system (I did add a new graphics card and soundcard) I finally decide to do a whole system upgrade again. I build systems in my sparetime for friends (and for some years also did this for earning some money) but since my current one was so silent and reliable I refused to change it. But since there are a few new games I want to play in higher resolutions I decided to go for an Athlon X2 42o0+ AM2 with an SLI-Board (Asus M2N-SLI) and I also ordered a Leadtek 7900GS. I went for silent parts again (Arctic Cooling CPU-cooler, the Leadtek should be silent too, Board is passive cooled) and hope that I won’t be disappointed. Well much blub again, but the bottom-line is : Setting up a new system takes some time (especially a developer system), so it’s possible that I won’t be updating this blog until the next weekend or so.