In June I was mostly working on the message and event system and I feel I have come to the point where I need to test it in a bigger context. In order to do this I need to add time to the game so that I can simulate to the next day etc. The simulator will be able to stop once every hour if there are urgent events happening which require your attention otherwise it will stop like in NHL:EHM. Deadlines etc will be handled differently.
The game is built up like a state machine so everything you see (apart from the ribbon and the status bar) is a state. This allows navigation to previously visited screens and back like in NHL:EHM. So for example the player profile is one state, the inbox is another state, league standings will be another state and so on. As you have seen screenshots of I have worked some more on the player profile's overview section, what you haven't seen is that I have also started implementing the contract- and statistics section. While doing this I also had to, for the first time, try connecting and reading from the database and everything went smoothly. While writing about the database, its design is still not completed but enough is done to start using and testing it at this stage. This is an area me and my experts will be continuously looking at until it is done.
I also need player-, team- and league for my tests. Teams and leagues I will create manually but I will be looking to implement a player generator which later will be used to create new players each year in the game. How this should work has already been discussed in the forum but I think it is time we try to come up with something concrete; what player types should be in the game? what are each player type's strengths and weaknesses (based on the attributes in the game). I will post a more detailed entry (today or tomorrow) in the forum and try to get a discussion going even though a lot is already mentioned and should be considered.
To sum up what I have done and what I will be looking to do next, here are two lists:
Done
- Basic implementation of message- and event system
State machine implemented
Started implementing more game states
First attempts at reading data from the database
Improved database design
- Start implementing the simulator
Create the player generator
Manually add team- and league data to the database for testing purposes
Test the message- and event system
Continue improving and extending the database