Hey! Paweł here again. Michael was supposed to write this Dev Minutes, but he has to work on the game and some other stuff (and also lacks writer skills), so I’ll do it for him. I’m a good rubber duck that helps him a lot.
Let’s jump right into the topic of explaining some basic mechanics!
Recently Michael has worked on various stuff. He tried out some ternary operator stuff, he has also started to think about XML deserializer of some kind and some ways to store states’ data. There were also clock and spreading mechanics included! He worked a lot recently, that’s for sure.
Let’s talk about the clock first. For this game we obviously need a clock. The game was planned to go from 1960 to maximum 2020. Player will be able to see what year, month and day it is through the UI. The clock is also important for some other stuff. About the clock Michael says:
“I looked at the game’s clock code I made the other day and I was wondering how to have events fire off when a certain time is reached. I was thinking about how different components interact with each other, about making the clock static and access the times through the clocks’ properties.”
A lot was happening around the code itself. Michael tried out ternary operator stuff (as a rubber duck I cannot really say what that is), so Michael explains it himself:
“I tried out some ternary operator stuff to simplify the code. For now I’ve left the if-else statement in the code, so I remember what I was trying to do. This is a property in the State class for the percentage of the state that is controlled by a company. I wanted to make sure the value doesn’t go above 100 (100%) and that it doesn’t go below 0 (0%).”
I suggested Michael to work on the perccentage of a state that is controlled by a company. Michael started to fix the basic algorithm he had and create a new system. He decided to pust all the State Popularity Modifiers (SPM for short) into an enumerated type. He isn’t sure about the choice, but he’ll see what happens.
State Popularity Modifiers are modifiers that decide on the speed of company spreading within a state. There are a few modifiers, a regular value (basic value for each state) and several modifiers including political, ideological and development features. It makes the game more dynamic and varied and might cause a little trouble in case of a war or other issues.
Oh, and it’s time to satisfy all people that love aesthetic. Michael formated the code so it looks nice. Why? He has no clue. I guess someone was searching for easy, relaxing work.
That’s it for today’s Dev Minutes. Thank you for your attention! We’ll come back this week with some sweet stuff about UI (at least I’m trying to work on it – remember, rubber duck doesn’t have hands, it’s pretty hard to work on UI this way).
Iguana Mercenary 