Quote Originally Posted by WILL
Hey so how is Village Defense coming along? I'm waiting for that cool multi/random road & layout idea version to be released.
Well to be honest, a new release isn't going to happen any time soon.

As you may have read on my site, I'm not going to continue buliding on the existing code. There are a few reasons for that.
Prime reason: I've come to realize that there are far too many changes to be made and the old 'engine' simply can't handle those changes.
A second reason for a rewrite is that competitions tend to be good motivators, the deadlines however can easily persuade you to choose the easy and often dirty solutions. Let me tell you, there are a lot of those in my code.
The last reason is fairly simple actually. During the development of VD I've made some design choices, which looking back, could have been done differently and probably a lot better too.

A good example, is the fixed path that the orcs are walking.
I've used fixed coordinates for the starting position, each of the corners and the end. At first it seemed like a good and easy to do idea, but it also meant a lot of work when a path changed.
Granted, it was also mainly because my editor was not advanced enough to allow for an easy way to input new coordinates. Perhaps with a proper way to insert the coordinates it might have worked.
But still, now that I've had the option to think a lot about the game, I've come to the point where I think that it would be nicer if enemies were to choose their own way instead of following a fixed path like a bunch of mindless drones.
The ideal situation would be to have a totally random world with possibly more than one path leading from or to the village, have an arbitrary number of spawn points and have the enemies figure out a way to the village, by themselves.

And that's just one of the things I'm currently working on. Well I'm not actually writing that into the game, but I'm giving that, and other stuff a lot of thought.
Stuff like the setting of the game. What is the situation. I mean in this version I had orcs and ogres, but why are they there, why invade villages?
What are the surroundings like. There is currently one map, entirely covered with grass. But the options for more are limitless: rivers, mountains, different trees and rocks, hills etc, etc.

And what about the village itself. What kind of bulidings are there. Are there going to be villagers? Are they going to play a role in the game.
The nummber of questions is currently quite endless.

Apart from thinking out the answers to these questions, I've also been doing some research on how to create better looking graphics. How for example can you make some real looking water, that
1: is animated, and
2: perfectly blends into the rest of the world. (And I dont mean blending as in using glBlendFunc)

Anyway, as you can see, there's lots to be done.
I'll be adding info and images, possibly even video's on my site in due time. So please do keep an eye out.