Bible Dave Bugs and 1.0 Roadmap Current known bugs: A crash in the Windows (and possibly other OSes) version on easy and medium difficulty. On easy it happens on the the night/mountain area (level 5.1) before getting enough bibles, entering with around 60 bibles. On medium, passing through 5.1 and reach the next area (5.2, most likely; the one with vine jumping). The player finishes his quota of bibles in these areas, but when he reach the end of the level, the game crashes and shuts down, rather than progressing to the Kilopawa village. "Growly" bass in the music and sfx reported on some soundcard/speaker hardware. In-game messages come in areas that don’t seem logical. Level 3.1 introduces jumping and how to climb vines, despite the fact that it comes after areas where this is necessary. Likewise, 1.3 includes jumping instructions, while 1.2 requires jumping. There are areas that introduce throwing of bananas and the ground monkeys long after these hints would have been helpful. Additionally, the mine area (level 2) is considerably more difficult than level 3-perhaps it would make more sense to switch these areas? In the Temple/Egyptian area, there is a block that the player can occasionally fall into. It looks like there is a solid block there, but the game behaves as if it is empty space. It is probably level 4.2, and it is near the beginning of the level, after dropping below the first platform. In one of the mine areas (level 2.1), there is a pit where there is no exit and the only option is to jump over the bats until the level resets. Roadmap As there are several things to be done it is good to have well defined goals. The roadmap below tries to give an idea of the things still to be done. The order gives an idea of the priority of the tasks but the easiest options could be implemented first if need be. Milestone 1: Level Design Status: almost completed There are currently 21 levels. The ultimate goal is to have at least 25 and preferably 30. These levels should be more puzzle-styled levels rather than the run-n-jump that all of Bible Dave currently is (except for :evel 4. 3). The level progression is unpredictable at times (especially when playing on easy). Sometimes areas will repeat themselves, which can be discouraging—the sense is, “I just beat this level, why do I have to play it again?” On easy, the repetition of a few basic levels can get quite boring when trying to fill the Bible quota. There’s a part in the Temple area where the floor falls in (the area with several beehives on either 4.2 or 4.4). It might be nice to include a bit of dialog when this happens. Milestone 2: Game customization and UI Status: not completed Bible Dave is currently only configurable from hardware aspects such as sound and video. The game content should be customizable by the player. The basic items are: Several colour variations of Dave. Several colour variations of the Bibles. Customizable controls. Multi-user support. A "Restart Level" button. More help screens are needed to introduce gameplay, including various obstacles and enemies, an explanation of the encouragement meter, and how and when to throw bananas, etc. A little more detail in Dave's face. Milestone 3: Optimization Status: mostly completed The game uses and interpreted language and thus is slower than if it had been written in a compiled one. Current computers that have 256MB of RAM or more and a 1Ghz Pentium III (or equivalent) or higher CPU run the game fairly smoothly. One of the most important things to fix is the way items are blitted to the screen. Currently the entire screen refreshes with the change of just one pixel. A suggested approach to fixing this is to use sprites and sprite collision detection to update only the affected sprites. Milestone 4: Packaging Status: in progress Windows XP/2000 packaging works fairly well. No tests have been done on Vista to see if the "binaries" run ok. No testing has been performed on 64-bit Windows installations. There are no packages for Linux distributions or an optional Linux installer. Mac OSX does not have a .dmg "binary".