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[Pineapple]

There were a few things I wanted to do but couldn't within the time allotted. I want to finish up my game and give it a more lavish release. I'm setting a personal goal: finish my polishing before voting ends in three weeks. Let's see if I can do it.

Boxer's Seconds on ludumdare.com

Todo:
Clean up interface code, there are a bunch of oddities as a result of my haste.
Fix the way shadows overlap.
Improve how character descriptions are chosen.
Better text area for notetaking.
Make the invoice completely draggable like everything else, and revise how it's generally handled.
Make fancy transitional bits for new rounds and reorganizing papers instead of everything just snapping like it does.
Rewrite the ants code
Rewrite the autosaving code
More faces! More options for character descriptions!
Support for more resolutions
I really wanted to add little gadgets to the desk that the player could mess with like a calculator, and a notepad for general notes, paper clips that could make papers stay together as a pile, stuff like that.
Implement boxing matches, their outcome told by randomly-generated newspaper clippings
Add a financial report after every match that tracks income and various expenses
Allow investing in fraud schemes to give the player residual income
Add "heat" and a pertinent felonies report, and allow the player to make bribes (and do other things) to reduce suspicion
Make the player go to court when their suspicion gets high enough to be indicted, and make them go bankrupt if they run out of money
Let the player spend money on aesthetics: plastic surgery to re-roll the player's appearance, and crack that's placed on the desk as particles and can be played with.
Move text into external files that can be more easily localized

[Pineapple]

Rewriting tons of stuff. I made new word wrap code that is elegant and amazing and the best word wrap code anyone has ever written, and I wrote new code to handle the interface that does the same things better and a few things new in like a third the amount of code.

[Pineapple]

I wrote new code that would handle the notes text area, since in the LD entry it's very hacked-together and lacking in features. Here it is, robust and awesome.

- Text editing! (With newlines!)
- Text deletion! (With both backspace AND delete!)
- Cursor movement! (With ctrl-left and right! And home, end, ctrl-home, and ctrl-end!)
- Mouse selection! (Including double- and triple- click selection!)
- Shift-selection! (As well as select-all!)
- Copy/paste! (I made it interface with the Windows clipboard but then it started crashing randomly and I had to settle with a local clipboard. )
- Undo/redo! (Extra smart with deciding what each undo should actually undo!)

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10116881/program/textfield/textfield.exe

[JobLeonard]

Rewriting tons of stuff. I made new word wrap code that is elegant and amazing and the best word wrap code anyone has ever written, and I wrote new code to handle the interface that does the same things better and a few things new in like a third the amount of code.

Would Knuth go apeshit over it?

[Pineapple]

Would Knuth go apeshit over it?

Probably. 

[Blodyavenger]

Those ants, I always loved such details.

[Superb Joe]

a game where you have to give inspirational advice to losing fighters while also correcting their breathing and pouring ice water on their junk would be cool. good luck

[Pineapple]

just making the new ui code play nice with some of the old graphics code

[Pineapple]

and it is all coming together for a second time

[Pineapple]

[Panurge]

a game where you have to give inspirational advice to losing fighters while also correcting their breathing and pouring ice water on their junk would be cool. good luck

Also that thing where they pull out the front of their shorts to aerate their lower abdomen.

And riding a bicycle alongside them while they jog, smoking a Cuban cigar and making improper suggestions about their wives in order to toughen them up.

(To apologise for contributing to the derailment of this thread, I'd like to say that this game is one of my favourites from the competition so far. Keen to see an extended version.)

[Pineapple]

So I've been thinking about adding some gameplay beyond just the actual puzzle.

My thoughts:

There'd be a career mode and a quick game mode. Quick game would be like it is now: you choose the number of candidates (which is directly related to difficulty) and you do a puzzle and you get your results. Simple simple.

Career mode would be separated into rounds. Each round would have you doing one puzzle. When you're finished with the puzzle you start a new one, and you'd receive a newspaper clipping describing the boxing match that transpired. If you hired the most seconds possible you'll have a high chance of winning, and it would fall lower for every number under the maximum you go.

When you win matches you'll gain money. And as you climb the ladder the prizes will increase, as will the difficulty of your opponents. So will, gradually, the number of candidates you have to sift through each round. But between matches you'll be able to bring up a catalog and purchase items that improve your chances of winning - new shorts, new shoes, new gloves, new punching bags, new trainers, new gyms. You'll also be able to order hits on upcoming opponents to cause them to be replaced by another, weaker, boxer, in case your chances are particularly grim. (And your chances - chances given you did well on the puzzle - would be clearly represented on a report about the opponent.) And you'll be able to spend money to hire a P.I. once each round that would give you several clear hints about which seconds hate who, and spend more to get more hints.

As you order assassinations on candidates and on upcoming opponents, your "heat" will go up. You'll get a quarterly report or something after every couple matches letting you know how close you are to getting caught and indicted. You'll be able to spend money on bribes to decrease your heat, or spend less money to assassinate prominent political figures as a diversion. (But there'd be something like a 25% chance it'll result in a severe increase in heat rather than a decrease.) You'd also be able to lay low and stop killing so many people for a while, but that would mean losing hires, consequently losing matches, and falling down the ladder.

If your heat reaches a maximum you'll go to trial. I haven't fully thought this out yet, but perhaps the more you spend on a lawyer the lower your chance of being convicted, and maybe there'd be another sort of puzzle involving obfuscating and disposing of evidence, and threatening and ordering hits on witnesses and the jury. If you go to jail you'll lose some money and most of your fame, but you'd retain the boxing equipment you bought so that re-climbing the ranks wouldn't be too tedious.

[Pineapple]

Thoughts on the court puzzle:

Each juror likes a few of the others. You choose which get killed and which stay alive. The goal is to maximize the number of living jurors that are distraught because at least one of the ones they liked died. The distraught jurors take longer to come to a unanimous judgment, and the greater the number the longer they take. You'd want to maximize your time to sentencing, during which your lawyer's dogs would be working behind the scenes to destroy evidence and do general misdirecting. The more expensive the lawyer, the less time they'd require. If you managed to eek more time out of the jury than it takes for the lawyer's dogs to get you in the clear, then you don't go to jail.

[Pineapple]

don't mind me I'm just testing the new essay-generating code

[Pineapple]

[Pineapple]

At first I had the numbers updating in real time as you marked seconds for kill or hire, but it felt really weird since the papers are supposed to be papers. So I added a "reissue" button where if you click it the form slides off the screen and is replaced by a new one that has the updated numbers on it.

Also, you now get a super saver bulk discount if you're assassinating 6 or more people at once!

[Kurt]

don't mind me I'm just testing the new essay-generating code

Mr. Schaeffer
"I'm a lesbian."

[Pineapple]

I started working on boxers and the mechanics of matches.



Every boxer has the four stats: power, endurance, agility, and style. The first three stats apply to odds, the last one affects how much people bet on each boxer. (You make more money when more people bet on you.)

I'm having a difficult time articulating how the numbers work, so here's a code snippet instead:

Code:

Function winchance%(a:boxer,b:boxer,abonus%=0,bbonus%=0) ' returns x/10 chance that boxer A will win
	Local afavor%=0,bfavor%=0
	afavor=(a.power>b.power)+(a.endurance>b.endurance)+(a.agility>b.agility)
	bfavor=(b.power>a.power)+(b.endurance>a.endurance)+(b.agility>a.agility)
	Local deltafavor%=afavor-bfavor
	deltafavor:+abonus
	deltafavor:-bbonus
	Return Max(0,Min(10,5+deltafavor))
End Function
Function match:boxer(a:boxer,b:boxer,abonus%=0,bbonus%=0) ' player should get a bonus of 3 when all seconds are accounted for
	Local chance%=winchance(a,b,abonus,bbonus)
	Local result%=Rand(0,9)
	Local winner:boxer=Null
	If result<chance Then winner=a Else winner=b
	Return winner
End Function

[Pineapple]

A nice sort of overview of what's been implemented so far:

[Pineapple]

Almost done implementing items, added a catalog for buying them:



Thanks be to landshark for arts