Pug’s Place

An update on Gpremacy, the Game of the Superpowers:

I just finished implementing selling resources to the World Market and buying resources back from the World Market, in other words part of Gpremacy’s stage 6 and all of stage 2 (note that my stages break down differently than those of Supremacy). Additionally, an impressive amount of back-end code is completed now, and the development speed for the general rule definitions keeps increasing. Even the things which further on in this update say “Not Started” have had lots of back-end work already completed. For example, the API for the Artificial Intelligence is being written at the same time as everything below, since I’m using a liberal dollop of the Command design pattern to perform any game state updates.

Also of interest is that I just received my copy of Programming Game AI by Example by Mat Buckland, a book recommended to me by Dave, my project adviser. I’ve barely cracked the book open as of yet, but it both has a good looking first chapter and comes highly recommended, so I hope that it will be my salvation when late October comes along and I’m programming an AI opponent for Gpremacy.

That means the overall project status is:

• Goal: “Supremacy 3.0″ Rules - In Progress
  • Stage 1A: Pay Salaries and Loans to the Bank - Done
  • Stage 1B: Transfer Production Units to Supply Center -Done
  • Stage 2: Sell All, Some or None of the Supply Units - Done
  • Stage 3: Attack - Not Started
  • Stage 3A: Conventional - Not Started
  • Stage 3B: Strategic - Not Started
  • Stage 4: Move armies and/or navies - In Progress (calculate pathing)
  • Stage 5: Build Forces and Weapons - In Progress (needs to be generic)
  • Stage 6: Buy or Prospect for Resources - In Progress (needs prospecting)
• Goal: Network Play - Not Started
• Goal: Artificial Intelligence - Not Started

Presently, Gpremacy weighs in at 3,631 lines of code with little in-line documentation (because of MonoDoc, woo!). It’s also lacking a lot of graphics refinement, but that matters little to me at present — it’s going to be tough enough to simply get the game in a playable state on time.
It’s fully ready for anyone with a copy of Mono to check out from CVS, build and try. It should even work in Windows (with Mono), but I don’t plan on testing/worrying about that until much later in development.

It really is a labor of love, and it’s a good thing too: this would be a back-breaking workload if I weren’t enjoying this coding!

Solicitation for Assistance:
If any of you have suggestions on a different motto for Gpremacy that stays true to the “feel” of “The Game of the Superpowers”, please post it as a comment!