Planning

Wrote this section on February 23, 2008 starting at 8:10 and finishing it at 8:45

What can I say? I am not feeling very well and probably shouldn't be doing this challenge but the game that I have in mind is easy enough so I figure that I might as well get it done as being sick is the perfect excuse for doing such a simple game. Remember that this series of games allows me to use parts that were created in earlier episodes, so this challenge should be finished fairly quickly. The game that is being created today is Drop Dead. This is a very simple game in which a group of players each take turns trying to get the best score. Five dice are rolled. If a 2 or a 5 are rolled, the player doesn't score any points and must remove the 2s and 5s from the set of dice. If there are no 2s or 5s then the dice are added to the player's running total for the round. The player keeps rolling the dice until all the dice have "dropped dead". The player with the highest total score is the winner of the round. Ties are also possible, though are rare.

This leads to the development outline. How am I going to develop this game? Lets take a look at my early moring plans for what I want to accomplish in each phase of development.

Pre alpha will be very simple as I will be cloning my poker dice game. The game mechanics and basic layout for the game are similar so this should get me most of the way to having a complete project with only a few minutes of work. A quick refactoring of the code and removal of non-revleant code will be done at this stage. For the few of you who feel that re-using old code is cheating, remember that I am only allowing myself 16 hours to complete this game (and I was 10 minutes late in starting) and the recreating of the wheel would at most take about four or five hours.

The alpha stage is when I get the game portion of the game working. In other words, The first player will be able to properly play throught the game.

More than one player needs to be supported so the next phase is to get all the players and the win determination working. At this point, all the code for the game has been written so we are done the beta stage.

The relase candiate will add a fancy title screen. I have the title screen in my mind already but don't want to spoil what this will be like.

Finally, any fine tuning will be done and I will officially post the finished game to the site.