Pip 23 Oct 2008

Slitherine Team Blogs. Written by the team to give you a behind the scenes picture.

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pipfromslitherine
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Pip 23 Oct 2008

Post by pipfromslitherine »

<p>Wow - been a long time since my last blog entry. I hang my head in shame - though usually it's just weariness!</p>
<p>The GBotMA beta process is going pretty well. Multiplayer in particular is beginning to take shape and hopefully the upcoming new beta release will get a few more people trying out the online game. It seems to be fairly stable, and I hope that most systems will be able to run it, no matter what their specs. Beta testing also helps to shape the UI as people come to it fresh and jar up against things which we have gotten used to over the development period.</p>
<p>At the same time we are ramping up work on the BBC game. The script based system for opening up the guts of the UI and the model seems to be working better than I expected. The scipting system is pretty quick, although the parser is a little less than easy to extend, because it is built upon a very simple system designed to just run the quest chains in GBotMA. I guess I will have to bite the bullet and rework it all at some point - but for now, once the script has been parsed, it is very quick indeed to execute the code. The result is that adding a new option for a unit is as simple as creating a couple of new functions in the unit script, and the UI will handle it all for you. I think that this is going to make it very powerful for modders and creators of other campaigns for the game.</p>
<p>The game's also looking great already. We have initial maps, and it's pretty fast to put things together with the build-in editor. Most of the units are completed, at least 1st pass, and now we just need to begin adding in the control points to allow us to play effects and animations.</p>
<p>Cheers</p>
<p>Pip</p>
antipasta
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Post by antipasta »

From an earlier Slitherine post "The first license agreement between Slitherine and the BBC, for the Battlefield Academy game, will be releasing for handheld platforms towards the end of next year. This ambitious project will see an innovative gameplay system merged with highly researched historical content to attract a wide and diverse audience."

Is your new BBC game based on the current BBC Battlefield Academy (http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/la ... demy.shtml) or is it a more ambitious project? Also can you say whether unit movement is grid-based or "free"?
IainMcNeil
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Post by IainMcNeil »

These games were the inspiration for the idea, but we'll be creting somethign quite different and taking it to a whole new level :)

We don't want to say too much about the internals of the game at this stage as we're experiementing and anything we say is subject to change.
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