Release for 3.0

I'm feeling a release coming on soon. I'd like to say 2 weeks, but it's more likely to be the end of next month. Sorry about that. I know it seems like I've got nothing else going on and that I should be able to work on this full time. I thought that too before I realised just how much trouble leaving school is.

Anyway, that's it for now, sorry about the long delays and I'll try and pump something out soon.

Thanks,

Michael.

Video Update.

As promised.

Timelapse of the Text Based RPG Competition programming.

Screen Shots.

I've been working hard on V3. There's a lot of new stuff going on. I ended up abandoning the old menu and adopting a similar but different look. I also made a cursor. I'll probably change it sometime soon though since it's not the most beautiful thing in the world.

Anyway, here's some shots

Just the menu, 'scuse the developer mouse coordinates in the
top left. Also got the cursor in there. Like you can see,
it needs a make over.

The cursor colour needs changing, but you can see that when it hovers over buttons on the menu, they scale up to be bigger.

When hovering over the quit button, it scales up like
the play button.

This is a picture of what will become the home interface. I'm not sure what to call it.

Shows the method of selection for the buttons in the home screen / interface. The market button will take the player to view the stocks on sale, and allow them to view graphs and other cool stuff.

Just another shot of the home interface, showing off the button selection.

And a final shot of the interface. Just showed all the buttons with the mouse hovering over them.

                           I think that's it for now, but more updates coming soon. I'm really
                           just working on getting the user interface working well since that is
                           all there is to version 3 I think.

I will probably upload a video later.

Week of code.

So I've been keeping to my word about my week of code. I've been working hard for the past 24 hours on my Text Based RPG competition.

I wrote a Zombie Apocalypse themed game. I've put a download link below for the three entries for the competition. 6 people dropped out.

Download

Will get back to work on Economy now.

June 13th - June 20th

Week of programming is what I'm calling it. I'm going to sit down and program as much as I possibly can and Economy will be one of the main focuses of that week. The reason for this? I finish my exams on the 13th. Which means that I will be free to do what I want until I get a job. Nice, huh? In the mean time, I'm going to study.

Bye for a few weeks.

I made a little demo of the new menu interface for you guys to see.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99T7OjQ58ZY

Enjoy.

Going to do some stuff today.

Right, I've got my programming hat on, I've got my music that's good for putting me into my programming mode. I'm good to go. End of Friday or Saturday, brand new interface for menus.

Wow... just haven't been posting.

So I've not actually done any work on Economy at all recently, I really need to get back into it.

For all you guys following this, I know I probably could have made some serious progress on it by now, but I just haven't been able to, it's just eluded me. Watch this space though... summer of code, here I come.

Java Game Programming Book

So I've been writing a book over the past few days and I finally decided to publish it online, so I published it on Amazon.

It's going for $15.00, most of that goes to Amazon, I only get around $2.00 from that,

Here's the link.

Economy 2.1

Finally got around to updating to 2.1. I know, you've been waiting a while, I haven't really released between 2.0 and 2.1, but I have most definitely improved upon the whole system. 2.01 brought a new trading system, with more resources. I didn't release that version. 2.02 brought the new trading interface, and 2.021 brought in a slightly improved trading system, where prices would fluctuate more relatively. In 2.03 I fixed the negative prices bug, and in 2.04 I brought the bug back (I have no idea how, still working on a fix) but I had a new bank. 2.1 is all of these awesome things and the trading system is back to high fluctuations. I decided that it's kinda fun to have a resource go from 2 to 102 overnight. So I left it in, but I need your opinions really.

That's it for now, you can download it here.

Economy 2.1: Download

So I've not updated the blog for about a week now, I've been incredibly busy, sorry. The good news is that I've actually managed to do some serious updating, and it's looking great! A few bugs that maybe there wouldn't have been in the previous version, but really, it's all working towards a greater cause.

I've not really been able to update as much as I'd like to, since I've been snowed under by work, and the rare moments that I do get a break, it's hard to find the motivation to update a blog or do some more coding...

I figured that two weeks in, and being at this stage, coming from the original python version, I could take a little break. Anyway, I'm going to bring to you, the all new, improved, shiny version of Economy.

Economy 2.0 features a new interface and a whole new mechanic. Instead of just buying and selling on a boring old grey interface, why not get to see what you actually look like and explore an unfinished map? That's essentially what it is. The trading is still there, except the mechanics that I wanted to get into the game are not really finished and polished yet. So I present to you, what I've managed to do so far. Economy 2.0

Here's a little video preview:

:)

Download:
Economy 2.0

Economy

My name is Michael Curry, over the past few days, I have been writing a game called Economy. Economy is a new Java game. It's a stock market trading simulation game. You buy and sell stocks and shares, and try to make as much money as you can in the time limit, which is at present, 100 turns.

I started writing the game in Python, and so it was rather text based at first. I then moved on to Java, after struggling to get a GUI working in Python. I created a poor excuse for a GUI, and that's when Silas came in. Silas Nordgren has helped me a lot to write the GUI and really get the game logic going, and has probably put more hours into this than I have, with getting the GUI to work. Overall, I would say that at least 20 hours of my time has been put into this, and over the last couple of days, I know that Silas has been working exceptionally hard to get us to this point.

This is the start of what Silas made, this is
what really caught my attention.

This was our second update, you may notice
some inconsistency at the top of the screens
with version names, that was just how it went,
for now we will just be going from 1.02.

This is v1.03, it's really coming along
quite nicely now, and we're proud of our
progress so far.

So that's where we're up to. We have put ~35 hours of our own spare time each into this whole project, and we are releasing it for free to the general public. Yes, we love you that much. There are only three things that we would like in return, but obviously they're not compulsory, otherwise it wouldn't be free. It'd just be nice if you could do them. You don't even have to do all of them, you could just do one or two out of the three, whatever you feel is adequate, that's great.

1. Leave feedback and suggestions for more features, we REALLY need new features. It'd be great if we could create the perfect game for you.
2. Give full credit to Silas and I. We put a lot of work into this, we'd hate to see our efforts claimed by someone else. (If you fulfil point 1, we will put you in the README under special thanks.) The way to give us full credit will just be to keep the README with it if you do decide to distribute it.
3. Our hard work impacts on our other areas of work... I know it's our choice to do it, but please, if you can, make the choice to donate. It'd be great to have something to show for our hard work, and to have something to keep us truly motivated. An added bonus will be your name put in the credits, and the highest donors will get stocks named after them.

Just remember as well, that you, as the user, are the most important part of a program. It would have no function without you. So please, use away.

You can download v1.04 here:  Download
You can now also play v1.04b in browser here: Play in browser.

You can download previous versions from the archives page.