Dev Day Diary: Public Shaming

At work we came up with a theory of "public shaming", that is that if you just publicize what is someone has to do to a wider group, it's more likely they'll pressure themselves into geting things done. Doing amatuer game dev is pretty much 99% about pressuring yourself, especially when you are a team of one.

Excuse me while I blabber, here's my self-pressure:

Short-Term:
- Find method to get the compass direction of a moving object, not just rotation or velocity. C++ method best.
- Make asteroids scaleable, not just fixed sizes, and accurately crash or bounce from that
- Create RockGenerator(s) and affix them to the boundaries of the player's playground
- See if the targetting reticle is useful or just annoying ... decide between target cycling or 4 option keys

Long-Term:
- bring beam/weapon system over from Fugue
- Develop shield system
- Outline beacon HUD
- Determine base creation system ... fixed, random, a bit of both?

That out of the way, I'm finding about an hour or so a day let's me just tick a couple of tasks away off. Things are actually starting to click and reusing some of my old UTC (Untitled Tempest Clone) has already made UAC (Untitled Asteroids Clone) into feeling quasi-gameplay-ish, or something like that. I've decided that instead of distinct boundaries or sectors, UAC will be about exploration and wandering, with a virtually unlimited landscape for playing within.

If it continues to click and I get anything worth actually releasing in any form, I think I've decided to release it as freeware, but add a bribery based economy to it. If someone wants features or fixes or ports or anything, they'll have to pony up. Bigger the bribe, the higher the priority it gets.

Considering, however, that all one can do right now is float around a really ugly field of rocks, I don't I'm going to worry about that yet.