Movie Tycoon Dev Blog #2: The Bourne Pancake Jamboree

There is now a poster upload feature!

Progress has been going well! Over the past week I've been concentrating on making the box office generator better and more realistic, and making the movie information pages more interesting. I've had a few of my friends test playing the game, and so far they seem to like it.

As you can see, my movie unfortunately never made enough to break through its budget...

As you can see in the screenshot above, you can now see the actors that worked on a movie on the information page, and clicking on those actors will bring you to their own page that gives you information about them.

Ceebo Ceebz is based on one of my friends, and some of this are inside jokes.

From there, you can see every movie they've been in so far, along with a usually comical bio and a random interview question that is dynamically generated.

The box office generation coding has been tough, and although I was stymied by a small issue, Stack Overflow came to the rescue with the answer. The random number generator in PHP apparently does not generate anything but whole numbers, so generating a number between 0.9 and 1.2 doesn't work. It doesn't give you an error message, mind you, but it simply doesn't work. Seems a little arbitrary, but hey, the more you know.

Box office generation is based on several things:

1. Quality of the movie
2. Effectiveness of marketing
3. Reputation of your company
4. A little bit of randomness to spice it up

Charts look even fancier now!

In addition to all of this, you can now send messages to other users and send money to them as well! My goal is to make this as cooperative a game as possible, as well as a bit competitive, so that should help in that goal.

So that's this weeks blog post. It's been going swimmingly so far, hopefully it only continues in this direction. If you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them!