Yanko called me to play tennis. I had no motivation for it. I found it more interesting to play Championship Manager. Still, I knew I had to walk and run, I can’t just sit in front of the computer all the time. So, we went to the court in JeriÄŤekova street. We got on the court, and now I had to try to win. How do you motivate yourself when winning changes nothing? I guess I should find joy in dominating the other player, Yanko – but that seemed pointless. So, I just kept hitting the ball back, and my thoughts quickly wandered to the game we are making. We worked quite a lot in the first week. Ian and I programmed the construction of buildings around the command center. We still don’t have graphics, so we’re using placeholders; all the buildings are just rectangles of different colors. It was easy to place the buildings on the map, but programming the construction time for the buildings was a bit more complicated, as the building shouldn’t be functional right away but after thirty seconds. We had to set a separate timer for each building, and more than one building could be constructed at the same time. Elena watched how this worked in Flash and created the corresponding fields in the database. That was implemented during the weekend. We all stayed at my place on Friday and Saturday, working all day and night until three a.m. She wrote to us yesterday about how to send building data to the server and what format to expect the response in.
Anyway, soon we should have the part ready that allows another user to see what the first user is building on their computer, meaning the server will remember all the actions users perform on their machines and display them on all screens, not just the local one. I’m excited to see that. After that, once building and unit creation are enabled, we will work on player vs player combat. Maxim would get frustrated every time someone said the word “user” and insisted that we say “player” instead. He also insisted we add a new building – a hangar – where the user can create helicopters and, for a higher price, planes. These units would move faster on the map and be more expensive. This would also mean that the vehicle factory would create anti-air units, which are effective against helicopters and planes. He said this would close the loop: Tanks destroy anti-aircraft units, anti-aircraft units destroy helicopters, and helicopters destroy tanks. We agreed after a short discussion, but Elena said the list of functionalities shouldn’t be changing all the time, and we can’t add one feature every week while coming up with two new ones, or we’ll never finish the game. None of us is the team leader, and everything is agreed upon. I can see there will be a lot of compromises. Something bothers me about the decisions made so far. There are two options: either I accept other people’s decisions and remain unsatisfied with my work, or I impose my own will and am unhappy because someone else now has to do something they don’t like. Still, we move forward, so it’s not such a big issue right now. When I get home today, I’ll try to write the code that will send data to the server, following Elena’s instructions.
In Yanko’s and my game, it was 4-4 in the games in the first set, and Yanko had just started his psychological war. He was sending me three balls because it was my time to serve, and all three went into the net. He tossed me the ball to serve again, but threw it to the other corner, so I had to run for it, and then he stood on the wrong side. When I had a little breather, he asked me the score or something else. When I was about to serve, he’d look away. If he had an oxygen deficit, he’d go for water and sit for two minutes, subtly trying to wear me down. He did everything as usual and motivated me to the point where I couldn’t sleep if I didn’t win. I focused only on the game and promised myself I wouldn’t lose another game. In the end, I won 2-0 in sets. Yanko got frustrated, but didn’t realize he had defeated himself by motivating his opponent.
When I got home and took a shower, I turned on my computer to send the current building status to the server. There was an email from Ian in the inbox. He had already written the code for that, as well as the one that reads the server’s response. Elena also sent how the information about whether a vehicle or soldier is being created in a building or camp would look. I started working on a graphical indicator to show how much time is left in the building process, and the same progress bar is planned to be used to show the progress of vehicle or soldier creation. Everything was going well. It looks like we’ll soon have a game that’s played on a server.
After my tennis match, when I got dressed, I put on the T-shirt that was hanging on the bathroom door. I didn’t realize it was the shirt Elena had worn when we were working at my place, and we all fell asleep just before dawn. It smelled like shower gel and probably her, too. Elena was online on chat so I told her what I was wearing, and she said I should take it off immediately. I was reluctant, but I could see it bothered her, so I didn’t want to do it on purpose. I told her it smelled nice. She called me an idiot and left the chat dramatically.
