Login System

So after much trial and tribulation, I have finally got myself a working login system with extensive form validation and what seems to me to be some pretty hardcore password encryption, as well as the user database set up and running. Pretty impressive, I think, considering that prior to a few days ago I had no idea what a 'salt' was as far as encryption goes. Next up is an email authentication system and a lost/reset password page.

Never in my life have I been so excited about successfully logging on to a page that says nothing but "Member-Only Content Here".

What motivated me to tackle this is I want to get some kind of bare-bones alpha program thrown together and add functionality from there. From my experience working on student games at the Gamepipe Lab at USC, I have learned that this is definitely the way to go when building your game. It's so easy to get lost in perfecting cool details that you never end up with a demo-able game or integration of features (or you run way over if you have a deadline), which in addition to making it hard to show off your work, can create problems when you try to merge things later. Better to see what problems might arise from that process early on before you spend hours and hours perfecting a feature.

As I continue to work on this game, I have the sinking feeling that down the road when I've learned a lot more, I'm going to be doing a LOT of rewriting and/or restructuring code. Oh well, I guess that's what the learning process is all about, and it's better to get in there and get your hands dirty than trying to perfect your plan first. Like Joel Salatin says, "Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly first."

Breeding Demo

Alright here it is! This is just a little demo that generates 2 random genomes (currently at over 100 base pairs), reads it, shows you what kind of horse those genes make, and then it breeds those two horses and shows you what kind of baby those horses would have! It randomly selects one allele from each parent, just like in real life, so remember the foal you see is just one of thousands that those parents could generate. To randomly generate more parents and see more horses, just refresh the page.

DEMO

Given that the genes are generated completely randomly in this demo, you see a much higher percentage of greys, unusual colors, and high sabino factors (white) here than you will in the game. Also, the only pictures that are done are for those at racing age/racing condition right now. There will be another set of foal pictures and a set of breeding-age pictures in the game.

PNG's suck

Being an artist, a good variety of art in this game is important to me - I want there to be hundreds of unique horse pictures. Rather spending 20 years to individually make all of these, I have opted to use PNG's and their support for transparency so that I can layer white markings on top of base images in combination. Pretty cool. Problem: I have noticed that in the browser, my brown and chestnut look almost identical. In Photoshop they look great, very clearly brown and red, but in the browser everything is desaturated! This turns out to be a problem inherent in the PNG format; without getting too technical, they have issues displaying the correct gamma in a browser. I found a program to adjust the gamma such that my images don't look quite so desaturated, but it's still a problem. I may have to convert my base images to JPEG and just have the markings be PNG. Not a huge loss, but it does mean forgoing the ability to customize the background on the fly...

Sorry for the Delay

I was in a motorcycle accident so I've been dealing with that. But the demo really is on the way before too long!

Back from the dead!

Alright we've been distracted for, oh, a year. But now I'm restructuring some code and updating the art, as well as working on a design document that consists of more than my frantic notes scribbled in the same beat-up yellow legal pad we've been carrying around this whole time.

The exciting thing: within a week or so I should have up a spiffy little demo of the genetics/breeding feature where you can pick 2 parents and see what kind of animal they create when bred together (different every time, just like real life). You'll only be able to see the effects of the 20-some-odd genes that affect the pictures, but it should be nifty!