Fortune Hunter is back in development

Well Monday marked the end of our fortune hunter break. We have been working hard to get back into action. Three of our original members, Dave Silverman, Keven Hocky, and I, will be actively involved in some way with the project. We have also picked up a new member, JT Mengel.

The Teams

There will be two teams working on fortune hunter this quarter.

Our art team, Dave and JT, will be working on researching and developing graphic standards/techniques for limited platforms like the xo. Their goal will be to come up with some graphic standards that will help rendering performance on the xo laptop. Their research will use fortune hunter as an example implementation.

The game engine team, Keven and I, will be working on creating and optimize a game engine that will be used for the game. This engine will allow easier debugging and cleaner code from the developer's point of view. It will have features like a dev console for debugging and hopefully a snapshot system.

Progress So Far

We have started to improve the game engine from the standpoint of the developer. Today I started off by splitting the game engine away from the main code to keep it clean and organized (t8). This will allow me to package the engine later on as a standalone that other developers will be able use in the future.

After that, I have been busy adding a Developer Console to the game engine (t5). My hope is this developer console will be very useful in debugging the game by allowing access to the game engine internals as well as access to registered components to the game engine.

I thankfully found a console script for pygame that I could just add to the engine. My next step will be to get this console to be more useful by writing methods that will allow inspection and modification of game state.

Infrastructure Update

Fortune Hunter now has a trac on fedorahosted that can be found here: https://fedorahosted.org/fortune_hunter. This track is now hosing our git, a doc wiki, and ticket system. I will still maintain our other git repo, but our developers will work out of fedorahosted.

On another front, foss.rit.edu is now getting some attention, we got some people now blogging on it. Always great to see more people working on the site.