Turning the wheels
A very serious stage has started out recently in the development process and that is putting all the elements of the levels together and preparing for play testing. We are currently using the in house level editor, Iranvij, to setup the level physical representations, graphics, interactable environment objects and enemy NPCs. Switching to “In Game” mode in the editor is quite handy for the designers to play test right on the spot and make sure everything goes together well.
The in house scripting system has reached a level which has made it almost Turing Complete, since it supports sequence for commands, some kind of primitive selection constructs and a good support for repetition.
All enemy AI behavior, main player behaviors (Hierarchical Finite State Machines) and environment interaction and main game logic are being handled on this scripting layer which provides a flexible framework for the game designers to prototype and test ideas. The whole mechanism needs some testing and tweaking before it becomes fully re-usable as a game scripting framework.Performance tuning this interface layer would be the next stage, as we usually plan for performance issues and follow the big saying of Knuth which is :”Early optimization is the root of all evil!”
On another end, we are researching into some good techniques for crash reporting so that the development team can find the problems found while the design or testing team are working a bit easier. This crash handler is one in which we are investigating at the moment.