Just when you thought game development was all exciting and interesting and full of screenshots, kebabs, and nubile wenches feeding us creamy grapes and wafting our sweaty feet with palm fronds*, I thought I’d share the To Do list with you, as of today, and the Done list, as of the last 6 months or so:

Bugs

• Crystals not being removed from map when exhausted
• Double music playing on start of world
• Fix story innaccuracies on Earth levels
• Gidrah spawn point arrows in wrong place
• Story screen sequence glitches
• Restore is broken
• Wire up powerup shortcuts in shop
• Moon gidrahs need idle animations
• Moon alt floor has some glitches
• Turrets go from having 2 dits of ammo to RELOAD
• change messageBox messages (eg. register failed)
• change register email so it works like net.puppygames.applet.screens.EnterNameDialog…
• need to set color to black, text to all caps, and email_x and email_y to be offsets like name_x,name_y

To-Do

• Medals screen
• Show medals earned on complete level dialog
• Video
• Put in a load of tips
• Tip sequences
• Building factories
• Harvesting
• Reloading
• Placing turrets out of the way
• Armoured gidrahs
• Base under attack
• Scripted tips that appear at set times in a level
• Define level events and put in mechanisms to generate them
• Adjust story in Earth and Moon for new tips system (and accuracy)
• Hiscores screen
• Remove screen flash from disruptor. Or tone it down.
• Really Exit Game dialog when close button is clicked
• Shift-click on a building to switch to Build Mode using that building (if still available)
• Show approaching gidrah locations offscreen using edge radar
• Increase barricade / mine limit with silos?
• Add ammo counter to capacitors?
• Different sfx for factory shutdown klaxon, base attack, base critical
• Better sound when many gidrahs attack at once
• Latest level should be highlighted in a different colour?
• Minimap?
• More feedback when activating powerups
• Bezerk effect
• Freeze effect

Done / Fixed

• Leftover alien attacking squares – maybe related to knockback or angry gids
• Deflected bullets at wrong angle
• Earth levels at constant difficulty; moon increases difficulty very slowly
• Armoured gidrahs to deflect bullets
• Collector available at wrong time on moon
• Moon too hard! Auto-difficulty tuning awry?
• Center dialog text like ‘GAME SAVED’, ‘MISSION ACCOMPLISHED’, ‘GAME OVER’
• Dialog text fade out bug?
• One or two odd glitches in GLStyledText
• Shop bleeps over invisible shop items
• Adjusted price of silos, collectors, autoloaders, etc.
• New factory mining sound effect
• Factory mining sound effect overpowers all other sounds
• SetLayers now works properly
• Maximum 100 gidrahs on a level, and timer stops when maximum is reached
• Crystals don’t wear out so fast
• Story Screen characters to allow multiple speech bubbles
• Backgrounds (bg) and separate anchors for backgrounds on settings
• Anchors for settings
• Shorten levels
• Shrink levels
• Slow down gidrahs on Moon
• Smartbombs only affect a gidrah once
• Autocollector now autocollects
• Factories once more fixed price
• <setlayers> animation feature
• Frozen gidrahs don’t change appearance to frozen when attacking
• Ensure some crystals are present on the level
• Better VBO rendering path
• More background loops for worlds pinched from Alien Flux and Ultratron
• Award end of level bonus based on remaining base hitpoints and world number
• Capacitor and laser can’t shoot through powerups
• Zoom To Building doesnt seem to work quite right in widescreen
• Factories to randomly select 1 nearby crystal to mine
• Remove extra bases on Moon onwards
• Fixed all buildings suddenly paintable by accident
• Black out inaccessible areas of map
• Crystal shrinking
• Factory <-> crystal effect
• Crystals to be impassable
• tooltips appear in the wrong place
• Fix shop background missing on first open (again)
• Display number of attempts & ranking in level select screen
• Dissapearing obstacles/crystals on first level played (attenuation bug?)
• Offset and textOffset bug on areas
• VBO stability problems
• Allow clicking on saucer in build mode
• Award players money when using smartbombs against gidrahs
• Crystals to slowly be consumed by factories
• Can’t build factory unless next to Crystal
• Crystals generation
• Show turret/capacitor range when ghosted
• Widescreen support
• Layout tags for areas
• Maprenderer
• Change GUI backgrounds
• Adjust XML for GUIs
• Change options screen
• Change slots to use areas
• Save and quit broken ( press it and nothing happens… press return to game and then it quits out with game saved message )
• Centre=”x” or centre=”y” or centre=”both” for screens
• Re-enable VBO code with checks and option
• Fixed mouse disappearing into black areas of fullscreen
• Fixed level completed / game over messages
• Make so ‘factory collect’ message dissapears when ‘shutdown imminent’ appears – otherwise theyre on top of each other
• Faded progress bar on story screen
• Delete broken on profile screen
• Force base position to be at least several sqaures away from edge of map
• Stop text breaking when style changes
• Better difficulty tuning
• Reset mouse cursor on story screens
• Fancy Pants text rendering for GLTextArea
• Auto-bolding
• Wait until boss & other effects removed before completing the level
• Story screens
• Fixed hotkey bounce on screen open
• Fixed background insets
• Restart level needs to reset game state to what it was when the level was started
• Record number of attempts a level has been failed at and adjust the difficulty accordingly
• Game screen pauses when covered by shop or other modal dialog
• Make game easier for crapper players
• In-game menu
• Quit
• Save and Quit
• Restart Level option needed
• Fixed not asking player for a name on first startup
• Fixed fullscreen toggle being broken
• Moved custom capacitor zap code into nice new TickableObject style
• Fixed shop closing if RMB held down while opening
• Much faster shop opening / closing
• Fixed tick/update glitch that caused labels to appear momentarily in the wrong place
• Investigate using plain VAs
• Can now scroll the screen with WASD or cursor keys
• Capacitors overpowered and too cheap – so now they recharge slower and cost twice as much
• Mines overpowered and too cheap – so now they cost more
• Investigate poor performance in build mode
• Fix initial proximity effect bug when closing shop or building something
• Zoom to last base when it is destroyed
• Fix emitter bug – gun flashes having screen offset somehow applied wrongly
• Fix emitter bug – see emitter-ruins-problem-2.png and emitter-yOffset-problem.png
• Fix buggered looking Game Over dialog
• Fix blurry edges of buttons
• Accurate danger circles around barricades and turrets (checked in debug)
• When clicking on game map, grab mouse
• Tweak HUD & shop to show number of barricades / mines left
• Fix shop descriptions so they’re accurate and fit in the area provided
• Show disabled things in shop better
• Limit barricade production & disable in shop when all used up
• Limit mine production & disable in shop when all used up
• Autoloaders to cost more each time they are built
• Warehouses to cost mode each time they are built
• Move game screen immediate mode rendering into effects
• Fixed single frame delay when switching animations in frame command – hurrah! – loads of glitches solved
• Fix shop background not appearing when shop first opened
• Fix flicker on icons in shop / HUD
• Stop RMB closing shop before it’s open
• Fixed music not streaming because fade=1
• Ramp up gidrah speed when factories are shut down
• Game Over screen
• Wait a bit longer after last base destroyed
• Fixed slot effects highlighting when Delete dialog is up
• Fix background insets
• Fix game not ending when base destroyed
• Fix proximity effects
• Fixed gidrahs not clearing “attacking” squares and eventually just sitting around doing nothing
• Disable factories and related buildings in shop after shutdown
• Fix performance of Backgrounds
• Bosses to ignore danger
• Prevent gidrah crowding on mass attacks
• When selecting quicklaunched buildings, don’t cycle the quicklaunch order
• Gidrahs to attack barricades a bit more quickly
• Stop alien animatino when thinking or stunned
• Fix totally broken texture appearance
• Tune difficulty exponentially rather than linearly
• Fixed emitters
• Further difficulty tuning
• Turrets don’t shoot at dead gidrahs
• Gidrahs now try and plot a route around your turrets!
• Continue button on Game Over dialog not yet wired up
• Fade very last segments of capacitor beam
• Investigate why gidrahs don’t flash white when hurt
• Make game easier
• Only 2 sorts of gidrah on earth, and no armour
• Gidrahs have less hitpoints
• Slower gidrahs
• More ammo from batteries
• More range from scanners
• More cooling from towers
• More production from reactors
• Fix factory count-up
• Fix ammo-count down
• Use colormap for timer bar
• When base under attack click to zoom to it
• Wire up B & click to do zoom to base
• Wire up T & click to do zoom to turret
• Wire up F & click to do zoom to factory
• Don’t centre mouse when screens change
• Longer period before aliens start coming to build base defences
• Spawn bosses immediately
• Fix cursors when screens change
• Ability to specify formations in world definition
• Pop up tips on HUD
• Capacitor beam weapon effect
• Performance fixes so far:
• Speed up Labels
• Triple buffer VBOs in sprite engine & other places
• Only invalidate paths inside changed bounds
• Speed up sprite engine
• Speed up capacitor renderering effects
• Speed up build checking
• Turn off build effect
• Faster pathfinding
• Faster gidrah movement code
• Double buffered VBOs in sprite engine
• Removed call to glGetError() on SwapBuffers
• Upgraded to LWJGL2.2.1 for VBO performance fix
• Speed up saucer effects
• Speed up building attack effects
• Speed up text rendering effects
• Speed up background rendering effects
• Speed up build effects
• Speed up proximity effects

* unless you’re my girlfriend reading this, in which case there are absolutely none of those involved in game development.