First Look at Tzarr - Global Game Jam 2014!

Good Wednesday!  I've got a video taking a look at the results of week one of production on Tzarr, including the rough basics and turn based game play.  Tzarr is coming along nicely so far, yesterday was tough, as I had a bug that baffled me for the entire day.  Finally I figured out what was wrong and fixed it and wham, everything magically worked exactly like I wanted!

The problem code snippet was this:

As you can see if you click on it, I was setting unit_grid which was the entire 9x9 grid to a shifted version of the move_grid, which was only 7x7 and contained the movement ability of each piece.

But the problem was that I was using different indices so it was rewriting over old sections of the array with 0 when I didn't want it to be.  I was already initializing the unit_grid array to 0s anyway in ClearUnitGrid(); so I just removed that line and everything worked perfectly!

But enough programmer talk, let's take a look at the video on Tzarr:

Honestly the game rules right now need to be changed a lot.  I played a game with myself and it was very easy to stalemate.  I'll be doing extensive play testing and making all sorts of builds to find a good balanced and fun rule set for Tzarr.

In other news, I'll be attending the Global Game Jam this weekend!  I'm super excited, I didn't think I would be able to get in, but because I signed up on the main site, even though they ran out of tickets, the head honcho said I was alright to come.  It's been a while since I've participated in a Jam (Since SBX: Invasion for the GMC Jam January 2013!) so I'm super stoked to get out and meet some cool people and stay up late like a youngster again.

I've been thinking of tons of ideas for all sorts of topics and my work on Tzarr has enabled me to work quickly with C# and Unity.  I think with a good team we could turn out something truly awesome!

Also, I just tried out Infinite Crisis, a MOBA by Turbine Games Inc that's still in Beta, and it's still under NDA so I won't say too much but I'll say this:  Sign up for the Beta, it's fun!

That's all for this update, I'll likely have a large update after the GGJ this weekend with the project my team has created and updates about how it went.

Cheers!

Jason C. / WakeskaterX