Update: Realistic Goals + Release Date Goal

Release Date Goal:  On or before Tuesday 18th of September (+10GMT)

Another update, this one good and bad.

I'll start with the bad.

• It's taken a lot longer than I would have liked (173 days as of writing this post). I took about a month (or maybe 2) as a break, I even contemplated giving up after initially writing the game in C++ with SDL but switched to Love2d and almost rewrote everything I had done in the span of a week. This reignited my will to keep working on it which is where we're at now. But I also have some other projects I've been wanting to start working on for a long time and Vector-TD has been the reason I haven't started them. I just want to release this and be done with it.
• I'm running out of steam. It's been a fun ride up until now but my enthusiasm has been stretched thin. The 'exciting' part of doing the path finding for the enemies, programming the tower logic and making an actual game is over, and now I'm kind of at the boring 'polishing' phase of game development where there's lots of bug testing and minor tweaks to make sure everything is perfect (which it won't be, I can assure you :P)
• The code base is now spaghetti. Since rewriting it in Lua using Love2d it started off really well, everything made sense and worked harmoniously. Now I've kinda gotten lazy and copy and pasted lots of tidbits of code, which meant that if I needed to make any changes, I need to make sure those changes were reflected in other parts of the code base since a lot of things weren't coming from one place. Essentially, the code base became too coupled and non-portable towards the end. If I could start over, I instead would have planned everything out at the very beginning with all the knowledge I have now, and make some proper classes and have the functionality that could cater for everything. Right now the networking code is just a bunch of conditional if statements :P This is mainly due to wanting to finish off the project as soon as possible, losing enthusiasm and getting lazy. It's a shame but I'm willing to admit why and how it's become like this.
• Lots of features are going to get cut out. This one hurts the most. I actually had plans on including lots of things in my version but that just isn't going to happen. Here are the main things we won't be seeing in Vector-TD:
  • More towers
  • 2 v 2 mode
  • Multiplayer modifiers
  • Player profiles
  • ELO system
  • Extensive anti-cheat (there will however, be some logic to determine if the game has become 'desynced' across machines)
  • Chat
  • Server Browser (Maybe)
• Server browser may or may not be a thing. I'm still on the fence with this one. It depends on how I feel when the time comes to release it. I have the resources to host a really basic 'master server' which will just be a list of servers people are hosting. But with that comes a lot of functionality (querying the master server, the master server pinging hosted servers to see if they're still alive etc.) so I'm not sure if I'm going to put it in or not. It will however, still have direct connection support but you'll need to forward your ports if you want to play against someone online. I had the idea of implementing UDP hole-punching (look it up) using the master server so people wouldn't have to port forward, but I can't be bothered. The alternative solution is to have everyone find games through the Vector-TD Discord which I haven't made public yet, that way you can still play against other people online.
• It doesn't look as good as I wanted it to. Its all simple 'developer' art. I actually wanted to have some nice effects and particles and stuff, but that won't happen. The sprites for the towers and things literally took me like 2 minutes to make at most. The game looks and feels very clinical.
• It's buggy, and it will be released buggy. Not much to say about this. There are bugs with the game, and when it's released it will be final. But maybe I'll be convinced enough to fix those bugs. Lets just hope people won't get too mad :P
• It's relatively easy to cheat. Not that I like to admit this but it's basically true. It's too much effort to try and make it anti-cheat the way I want it. There will be some things in place, like the game stopping if it detects that something has gone out of sync (say, one player lost more lives on one persons machine, but didn't on the other). Since I'm assuming the community playing this will be either really small or non-existent, I'm hoping online play will be more of a trust-based thing.
• It's not fun to work on anymore. I just want to move on already. I want to work on other things. I want to build a 3d software renderer. I want to make games for the rs-97 handheld. I want to do other things than stress about Vector-TD, or feel guilty about playing Melee when I should be working on the game. I'm hoping that when people play it and realise it's not that good, someone will take it into their own hands and make a decent remake of Starland TD with cooler effects and more towers.

Alright, now for the good!

• It IS getting released. I promise you it will. I've come this far and I'm not going to drop it and move it without releasing what I've done. It's too much work to just throw away.
• It will play just like Starland-TD did. Or at the very least, it will be really similar to how Starland-TD played. Same tower types, same enemies, same enemy leveling, same tower abilities, same difficulty curve etc. Basically a crappy remake of Starland :P
• There will be Multiplayer. It won't be polished, but it will exist. And you'll be able to play both LAN games, or with someone on the other side of the world (as long as you port forward).
• I'm very close to finishing. In fact, I'm hoping to get it all finished before next Wednesday (my birthday). I really want to get it released by next Tuesday (+10GMT) so that it's done and dusted.

That's all I have to say for now. Hopefully the next update I write will be the final release update.

Until then.

-eragnarok