Teamwork!

The exciting technical news this weekend is that I've nearly finished the Generator program. As of Saturday afternoon, it's generating Message subclasses from the master XML document, and I'm not aware of any bugs in the generated code. [Edit: found one!] I still need to add some error checking and make it generate the HTML documentation and the dispatcher, listener, and adapter classes, but that shouldn't take more than a day.

The next step will be writing the XML for all the requests and data involved in getting the player logged in and into a game. Once I reach that milestone, I'll turn my attention to the game server and reference client. And when the client and server are roughed out, it will be time to invite other developers to join the project.

I hope to find at least one person interested in developing the client in parallel with my own work on the server. This may help me finish the project sooner, but that isn't the goal. The main reason I want to bring in other developers is to get some experience managing a team. I'm curious to see what happens when Subversion detects a conflict in one of my commits, but the challenge I'm truly interested in is effectively communicating design intentions and coordinating other programmers' contributions.

The first place I'll advertise will be the Java Forums. But I'd also like to draw the attention of the remaining Trade Wars crowd. The only problem is, where to reach them? Advertising on the EIS boards is probably out of the question, since my game will be in direct competition with theirs, which is a commercial product. But perhaps the developers of SWATH will see some value in helping me revitalize the market they serve. And who knows — perhaps Trade Wars 2002 will enjoy a resurgence of popularity if my game brings new attention to the genre.