I wonder... how are the spikes going to be implemented? Are they going to be like HatPC or are they going to by instant-kill?

I'm not sure what that last post meant, but as of now, touching a spike will automatically kill you, even if it's completely implausible in real life.

Anyway, here's a list of all the progress I've made today:
Spikes - floor and ceiling. Completely forgot about side spikes, but adding them should be simple copy-pasting
Platforms - except that unlike HATPC platforms, they don't grab you if it's on the fourth tile up, but I'll add that later
Doors - if you have enough power boxes, you can enter the door, which will take you to the "you beat this level" screen, where you can then restart, quit, or whatever. This screen seriously needs to be worked on. I'm making sure the level is compatible with multiple doors, b/c that could be a cool feature to have.
Keys - These are basically power boxes (treasures), but in the code, I'm referring to it as keys. I'm making it flexible enough that if you want, you can make a Custom Tile that when grabbed adds to your key-count by any number you want, essentially allowing you to come up with fractional increases, or even decreases if you use negative numbers. Of course, this should also come with the option of letting you set the "total key count" necessary to open the door.

now because of frustration, the next thing I'm gonna be working on will probably be an early version of the level maker, so that I won't have to create the level code by hand.

what are the characters for the new items?

like in the level code? It really shouldn't matter since there will hopefully be no need for you to interact with the code, but so far it's just like HATPC, except for platforms, which instead of "=", it's "-".

When are you going to update the Aeon Demo that's on the site? You know, so that we can test out these new features and stuff...

maybe in a few days. First I'll see if I can get a level maker thing up, and fix some glitches that are lying around.

I spent all of today working on Aeon, and I stayed logged out to stay focused.

I got a ton of new ideas on how to improve some things around the game, but first I should probably get my ideas in order before I start acting on them. One of the major problems with the game so far is my lack of planning and organizing. It would probably be best to begin working on that issue after I get the new layout out of the way, but I might as well release a demo with all the upgrades in the game so far so that you guys can test it out and comment on it and stuff.

One interesting idea I got was to get rid of the hideous debug panel and just make one big textbox where you edit everything using XML. You're probably thinking that it's a terrible idea, but if you've ever seen XML, it's super simple and you can understand it just by looking at it. Here's an example of how it may be like: you'll basically be able to figure out for yourself how to change what. And it's also more flexible on the coding end since Flash can very easily convert all this into variables that I can use, and you're also not limited to that clunky user interface. And it means that I can also add more things without having to go through the trouble of worrying how I'm gonna add its options to the Debug menu.

This also allows you to have a ridiculously amount of freedom when it comes to manipulating with the game's engine. For example, I was talking to Isa yesterday about how in Aeon each side of a tile has its own set of properties and reactions to the player. So you could essentially create new tiles for the game on the fly. That is, I could leave a couple "blank tiles" for you to mess around with. But it probably won't be very interesting seeing that tiles still can't do a lot. For instance, treasures are in the game, but if you stack them on each other and then collect the bottom one, the ones above it won't fall.

I'm not sure if I'll release a level-maker prototype with the demo. We'll see....

I lost internet all day today! It was horrible! I think what happened was that some technician was working on some house's internet, and it somehow disrupted ours. My dad called them to get them to fix it, but they told us they would send a guy tomorrow Lately, I've been posting from my dad's Droid (phone), but it's such a hassle to use...

But yeah, with this internet blackout, I pretty much spent the day working on Aeon again. I got the XML idea working (and it's really cool --codingwise, at least). I started working on the level maker, but then I realized how much work that would be, so I'll leave that for another day. I'm pretty much ready to release a demo, but first I have to get internet back so that I can upload everything. I should also probably check everything to see if it's working alright.

Oh and I also fixed (or tried to fix) a glitch that let you go through tiles if a collision with one tile was to put you in collision with another tile, the latter tile would not read the collision. And the fix is actually pretty cool, but I don't feel like explaining it. However, there is yet another mysterious glitch that lets you go through tiles. It has something to do with when you're just barely in collision with an object in one frame but it treats it like you're both out of contact and in collision. I couldn't figure that out..

what is this aeon thing and where do i find it

http://www.interguild.org/aeon

that is cool when will you release the full game

I have no idea when it'll be ready for full release. It could be by summer, or by the end of the year, or even by next year.

You know, back in mid 2008, the pessimists said that it wouldn't be released until October '09...the very first demo was released then. There's a LOOOONG way left, I think. Don't count on a release this year if Livio suddenly doesn't increase his pace dramatically.

No, the pessimists (Dando) said it would never be released.

WRONG!!

CSD said that it wouldn't get released at all. He was the mega pessimist.

I think that my blind guess was that we might have a shot at doing it late-summer/early autumn, but I remember being not very confident in my guess, and thinking that it could take longer. But I definitely didn't believe that it was going to come out in March '09, which I think was some people's original estimate. Upon further reflection, I think that my original guess was somewhere around March-June 2009.

Livio had to learn all of this stuff. I think that that was likely one of the most time consuming obstacles. But I don't really know.

Now it's just a matter of will he actually work on Aeon. He's making progress with the tiles. Depending on when he finishes the layout, it might only take 1 to 3 months after the layout's release to finish adding the tiles. Maybe less, maybe more. Water will probably cause some difficulties.

The real big tasks probably comes after that, where he'll have to make decent looking animations for everything, make a level maker, ect.

And then I'm sure he'll also find other ways to delay it, like by deciding that our new new layout isn't good enough, and that he should start on a newer new layout.

I dug up some posts from the old interguild, and this is what I found.


CSD claimed that we wouldn't finish the game at all/it was extremely unlikely that we would finish

Dando was pessimistic about our chances of finishing the game, but was more hopeful. I also. She would also say "if we finish" a lot.

I couldn't find any of my predictions, other than "I don't think it'll be finished by summer[2008]," but I did notice that I would say, "when we finish the game"

So, what did Livio say? You're going to love this. Lets see what he said, and compare it to what has happened. Keep in mind that this post was made January, 2008.

First demo has been recently released
We're kind of doing this now
He's apparently somewhat making the levelmaker now(?), before being finished. We're probably going to make the level-maker prior to the main levels. And as it turns out, we might not be using the old text system we originally planned on using. But I have no clue what he's talking about half the time.
We released the new site way before the first demo. Who knows when we will "officially finish" Aeon.
Aeon was in fact, not released prior to the summer of 2008.



Through these posts, I can say that Livio has already gone past some of the expectations of other users. But he's fallen way short of his own expectations(finish before summer '08)

So to summarize, for Canadians the glass is half empty, for Americans the glass is half full, and we Dutch don't care about the glass because we've got several more crates on the balcony anyway.

yeah, I stink at planning stuff. I guess my expectations were more goals than anything. Because you wouldn't be really motivated to work on something if you thought it would take you 10 years, right?

And you know what, I don't think it matters when we "finish" Aeon. The idea of making it is interesting enough; releasing demos, having everyone track progress, mess around with what's been put up so far. My initial idea of how the development process would be like was much more linear than what turned out to be, and as I learned the other day in my AS3 programming book, it's also one of the least efficient. What we're doing now with these demo releases is closer to the Iterative process, where we kinda go through this loop of planning->work->testing->feedback. But it's also probably more fun to work this way.

At this rate, we'd probably finish Aeon in multiple years. But considering the recent increase in progress and potential future increases as well as decreases in progress, it's really uncertain when we'd finish. There's a chance that a lot could happen over the summer, leading to a potential release by the end of the year. But there's also a chance that those opportunities won't come.

And I'm just talking about getting the game programmed. I'm not even considering how long it would take to design all the images, animations, or levels.

My goal at this point for you, is to just at least finish all of the tiles, and maybe the levelmaker somewhere in between.

I don't think that the difficulty of doing it is the reason for the extremely long time that it's taken to get this far, but rather the fact that you just plainly haven't worked on it.

If you somehow managed to not get sidetracked(I shouldn't dream like that), you could probably make some pretty decent progress in a pretty short amount of time. (This is similar to how if I didn't procrastinate on my homework every night, I would finish in a very short amount of time, as compared to me being on the interguild/watching tv while doing homework, and taking all night to finish it.)

However, some tiles will probably prove to be very difficult to code for, such as water in general, arrows, dynamite. It'll also might take a while to code tiles so that they can fall or get destroyed, and it will probably take a while to make it so that you bounce when you hit crates, and you can walk over an empty space when going towards a platform.

That's just my guess, though. I can't say for sure, because I don't program games.

I think the reason why I haven't worked on Aeon much in the past few months wasn't just because of the new layout, but also because of that one glitch that I couldn't figure out, and I kinda ended up procrastinating from that. It wasn't until the other day that I decided to work on it the whole day and I was finally able to figure it out. Since then, I've made a lot of progress.

What I would like to work on next is to finally create a solid plan of how everything is going to work. Right now I feel like a lot of my code is comparable to a bunch of sketches everywhere. It might run nice right now, but it's not going to work well in the long-run, especially when the program is gonna have to run through more things on each frame.

I really am motivated to work on Aeon, unlike Isa thinks. But I have to worry about other stuff too, and sometimes I underestimate the amount of time it takes to work on things; like the new layout: I thought it would take only a while to get that up, but then I became more ambitious with it, tried making new designs, and even though the current new design is way better than what I started with, it still took a long time.

I don't think the answer is to throw all of my time and energy into Aeon and trying to make as much progress into that as possible. If I do that, not only would I stay logged out more (b/c I'd be working on the game all the time), but the Interguild might start to deteriorate as less things happen here--that is, unless I release a new aeon demo after every other major update, which could turn out to be pretty interesting. But apparently everyone's been telling me that the Interguild would actually become more active with Aeon progress.

But I guess the real thing that keeps me from working on Aeon full-time is because Aeon isn't the only thing that I actually want to work on. Like the level database upgrades and the blog idea, and of course, the new layout. And I remember a few months ago I posted about how when I try to prioritize my workload, I end up getting less things done because I always tell myself not to work on other things, and when I don't feel like working on what I'm supposed to be prioritizing on (like Aeon, for instance), then I just end up working on nothing at all.

Man, I really rambled a lot in this post.

I've been working on Aeon for a while. I've begun to create a more stable plan for how everything in the game will work, as opposed to just throwing code everywhere. I'm also trying to keep the file as small as possible by making everything out of code, instead of making the game call up images that Flash had to export. For example, the buttons on the homepage that link to Demo and Debug used to be images, but a while ago I made the same thing completely out of ActionScript. It was kinda fun making that.

The way that the new version of the game is organized is that there is one big parent object called Aeon and a bunch of subordinate objects for things like the Debug panel, the Homepage, the Level Page. The Level Page in turn has a couple subordinate objects of its own, such as the Jump to Start screen, the pause screen, and the Level Area itself. In the old version, there really was no method of organization. It was just a bunch of code that ran on top of itself. Now it's gonna be much easier for me to add more pages and more features and stuff.

Aeon. "Interesting". No offense but it's sort of a HATPC ripoff.

it was inspired by HATPC, but according to jell, it will definitely not be a HATPC clone.

The project started because we were sick of all the glitches in HatPC. So yes, it is very much like HatPC. But I try to differentiate it as much as possible. Especially with the graphics, instead of simply copying all the HatPC objects I try to change them to suit a new theme. Like instead of arrows, I'll use missiles. And instead of wooden crates, all the crates will be made of metal.