So I’ve decided to do these monthly progress report things. Weekly/Fortnightly seems to be too often, but if I do an end-of-the-month report I should at least have something of interest to talk about.

This month I finally got the project in source control – if you don’t currently use an online versioning system for your own projects I highly recommend getting EVERYTHING into source control NOW. I use assembla, but there are lots of online version control hosts out there, some better/cheaper than others.

I got a little distracted this month with recovering from the holidays, attending the 2009 Global Game Jam, playing Persona 3 (55 hours in, haven’t finished yet) – And just general working out what the heck I’m trying to build here.

The goal is now to get a working prototype done by the end of July this year (thats six months!) – I don’t know if it will be a public prototype yet. I might just show it amongst friends and collegues, but the idea is that I have a playable, if not complete game – I might take a leaf from Jay Barnson‘s book and try to make it a ‘pilot episode’ – We’ll see.

Most of this month and the coming month will be spent on the level editor and CRUD  – That’s Create Read Update and Delete for all you non-geeks. Basically all the stuff that you want to do when you want to deal with data. I’m using custom flat file formats in order to maintain portablility. Its the type of work that is not very hard but it is very time consuming as I have to sketch out the data format, write save/load functions and drag and drop UI controls onto a form and bind it to the data so that the user can edit and tweak all the values.

And RPGs have lots of data, oodles of it in fact. All those HPs and MPs and Spells and Monsters and Resistances and To Hit scores, and classes and races and lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Can produce some pretty large tables.

Heres a screenshot of the current world editor in progress