Wow, what a day.

I should begin by saying that I’ve been ill today, and so didn’t go in to work. But that doesn’t mean that I had all day to play with Damsel; My head really hasn’t been very together for most of the day, so I suspect that writing code would have been a bit futile anyway. (And besides, I write games professionally for a living. Writing personal games during work hours would be just a wee bit unethical)

I did begin to feel better in the late afternoon, so I’ve spent a few hours on Damsel tonight. I don’t have nearly as much done as I would have hoped because I didn’t want to push myself, but I do have an initial screen (click the thumbnail, above), a Title screen menu (blatantly copy-and-pasted from the ‘Asteroids’ sample game included in the core VectorStorm release), and have the project all set up under source control. And I picked out a few pieces of music that I want to use. And that’s about it.

Now, I do want to mention that while I’m building Damsel in a private subversion repository right now, I’ll be putting the code and data somewhere public when I release the game on Sunday, for anybody who’d like to take a look at it. But do be aware that unlike VectorStorm, the Game in a Week things are written for speed of implementation, rather than for maintainability and clean design, so they might not be something you want to learn from or emulate. :)

In the “changes that will roll back into VectorStorm” category.. in the Damsel copy of the VectorStorm engine, I added a comma, and both forward and backward double-quotes to the vsBuiltInFont, specifically to be used in the screen above. Those changes will eventually find their way back into the basic VectorStorm repository; all three are useful characters which I was surprised to discover weren’t already in there.

Anyhow, I’m hoping I’m feeling more together tomorrow, and can actually put together a real gameplay prototype. I’ll be worried about my ability to actually deliver a fun game on Sunday if I don’t have an initial version by the end of tomorrow.