City Tuesday progress July 26th

Sometimes the reason developers are secretive about what they are working on is because a lot of game making is really boring. I have spent the last two weeks working on code to make a subway car move across the world. After these two weeks I don’t have a great new screenshot to show you or a video that will induce the uninitiated into anticipation. However, I do have some new robust code that will keep schedules for all of the vehicles.

In order to get time travel to work in City Tuesday, everyone must be scripted. The trains must run exactly the same every play through. Therefore, I spend a lot of my time making sure that the code is precise enough to make the train hit its marks yet robust enough so that I can change it on the fly if tomorrow I decide the train should arrive at 3 minutes and 15 seconds instead of 4:32 seconds. When I make that change, all the screens between the start and finish must slowly increase the train’s speed so that it will arrive at the time I now specify. It is a discrete problem that is magnified over the course of the train ride. If each screen is off by a tenth of a second then by the end of a 10 screen trip the train will be off by a full second. Getting the equations right and accounting for the edge cases (like I want to make the train slowly accelerate) are what bog you down. I could spend weeks on this problem and not have anything to show for it. It can make a part-time developer like me sweat as my targeted release schedule gets pushed out like the train that I am programming.

However, that is all done now. This morning I got the time code working just right and without any bugs standing in my way I should be able to add a new bomb puzzle. I had to get my vehicle code perfect because this bomb that I will be implementing relies on a series of garbage trucks picking up the trash cans from around the city.

Keep checking here for updates.
I have been positing visual proof of City Tuesday’s progress on www.screenshotsaturday.com so check there.