Month: August 2014

With a total of 120 hours of work, I am happy to say that Le Havre is playable. There is still a lot of testing, bug fixing, and polish to do; but I’ve played through a full game.

Main progress this week:

• All the building actions for the normal and special buildings
• End game

I am still expecting another 40 hours or so of work on this game. I’d like to have quite a few more sound effects and player prompts and some better animation for resources being paid/received. And once beta testing starts, I’ll have usability improvements to make too.

Continue reading “Le Havre – Week 3”

I have put another 40 hours of work into the touch table conversion of Le Havre, so it is time for an update. In the first week, I did a lot of work with the graphics and layout of the game to make sure that the game would fit onto one screen. In the second week, I have been making the game play.

Here are the progress highlights:

• Created graphics for player areas, offers, supply tiles and added animation of buildings and resources.
• Incorporated the timeline engine and added save/load and undo to the engine.
• Built the main menu: players can join, choose their color, pick options and start the game.
• Player area replication code.
• Added the “take offer”, “end turn”, “end round”, “buy building”, “repay loan” moves.
• Added the scoreboard and scoring logic (except end game bonuses).
• Created “feed workers” and “pay interest” dialogs.

The big things left to do are: all the buildings, end game. I feel like I am about half done with this project. We will see how accurate that estimate is. When estimating for a client, I always double my gut feel (and that is usually still too short). So I probably have another 3-5 weeks of work to go.

Continue reading “Le Havre – Week 2”

I’ve spent about 40 hours working on Le Havre. About half of that time has been spent planning screen layouts and designing graphics for the buildings and ships. Bill came up with the idea to draw all the buildings (even the ones built by the players) in the center area. This keeps the player areas very small and leaves almost all of the screen space for the “town”.

Even with that idea, the space is still quite tight. I’ve had to create a different view of the buildings and ships for each “mode” that they are going to be displayed in to limit their size.

My main accomplishment this week has been coming up with a screen layout that will be able to display everything that the players need to see, and a design of the ships and buildings that will fit into that layout. I am now fairly confident that it will be possible to play this game on the touch table.

Here is the basic layout:  Continue reading “Le Havre – Week 1”