Preemptive Musings

So... is it too early to start thinking about level design, player challenges and difficulty curves?

Probably.

I've been listening to a mix of Autechre, Future Sound of London, The Orb and Darkhalo, which has been conjuring images in my head of different ideas for different sorts of challenges / levels. I have a couple kicking around that seem like they'd be a good implementation of challenge and introductory gameplay.

On a side note, I love Minecraft. My friends started a multiplayer server, but I have been unable to connect to it. We think it's because my ISP (Comcast) is one of the most atrocious providers known to mankind and is potentially screwing with the stream (as they did with Bittorrent).

However, I now consider this to be a bit of a blessing in disguise. Had I access to the server, I would no doubt spend hours and hours mining and building and carving and crafting rather than coding. Minecraft, like World of Warcraft, is simply something you cannot mediate. It consumes wholly and deliberately all free time, with nothing to show for it but virtual accomplishments in block assembly.

Not that I'm faulting it. It's awesome. But I really should be spending my time coding instead.

Sooooo anyways. I have a appointment with lucrative prospects in Worcester at 4pm, then it's home for hours of coding. I want to add a tad more functionality to the object addition / manipulation before moving on to collision detection, so I will likely tackle that tonight.

Fortunately for me, the changes I want to implement are straightforward and easy (though I've seen how that assumption has turned out previously). I just want to be able to rotate the object via mouse gestures while holding down a mouse button, move while in edit mode, and I also need to add sphere and cylinder functionality (currently I only have rectangles*).

Then it's on to my awesomely brilliant collision detection algorithm.

Actually, I should probably add textures to the shapes so I can actually discern the edges and whatnot. That might help.

*I should stop calling them rectangles, since that term really only applies to a 2-dimensional object. I should call them right irregular non-rhombic hexahedrons. Vote in the comments for whether you'd like me to use "rectangle" or "right irregular non-rhombic hexahedron" in future posts.