Wrapping up!

I've spent the last week working extensively on the evil list  (Which honestly is completely ridiculous.  Who in their right mind seriously does some of those things?!) and testing the game over and over.

I'm so thrilled we have such a great end product.  I love our game and will definitely be buying it and recommending it to everyone I know with an XBOX.

Loved this class so much.  Really considering the MGS Masters.

3 weeks of progress

Last week we finished up getting basic messaging into the game.  Players will now know when they've advanced to the next round in addition to an alert for when a new wave of ships is spawning.

Current focus is on getting Help Tips u and running so that our play test on Saturday will run smoothly.  Ideally it should be possible to pick up the game and understand everything that's going on without any of us on the team needing to explain everything.

Initially I think it's going to just be text for this Sat, but as an end product we'd like to incorporate images as well.

Note since I didn't blog about it then:  The EA and Disney guys coming in to comment on our game was hands down the best and most interesting feedback we've gotten.  I really think it helped us finish off our game in a way that will really make it shine.

First Update in Ages

It's been ages since I last posted I know.  Every time I remember to I'm not at a computer and by the time I get to one I have something to do and don't remember to blog.


This semester was initially consumed with a mass porting of code from 3.1 to 4.0.  During the process I wished for nothing more than that we had initially been using 4.0.  We spent SO much time porting the code over that could have been used to continue developing the game.  In particular, Wilson and I ported over all the code we'd worked on the first semester (menus mostly) in addition to porting and updating the entire graphics engine for 4.0.

After that we got to work on the HUD, making it title safe and adding the pod elements so it was easier to know how many pods you had on the ship and to make it obvious how to use them.  In addition to that we created a scrolling credits screen as a mini side sprint.

From there I've spent the last 4 weeks working on turrets for the capitol ships.  This was a particularly challenging task as up to this point I'd never actually worked with the code that interacted with Maya models.  It's taken a lot of work, but I believe that I've now finally got the turrets working so that they fire at the player, are target-able, are destroyable, and that they're drawn correctly on the capitol ship.

Game Review and Progress

Finished the target lock on system on Thursday (forgot to post this then) and have started on part of the AI programming for our final sprint.  Don't really know much about AI so it'll be a good learning experience.

Also just reviewed Curse of the Crescent Isle which was a pretty interesting little platform-er.  I liked a lot of the ideas they came up with, although the difficulty level was a bit high I thought.  No place I saw to give actual feedback to the creator though.  Might review a few other games for fun, it's cool to see what other people come up with.

Lock On System

Wilson and I have been assigned to work on the Lock-on System of the ship.  This has proved much harder than we initially expected.  We really need to get together with the team and talk about how we want the system to work as our initial attempt to get it to work was not as detailed as we would have liked.  I also came up with a cool idea of having the targeted ship glow red as opposed to drawing something around the ship which we weren't sure how to do.  If ships simply had a boolean we could toggle to indicate if they were locked on to and then just emit the glow I think it would both look cool, and simplify a lot of coding.

Pause and Onwards

We've got the pause screen working almost perfectly, there's one odd bug when you go back to the game from the options screen, but we're working on that.

The next step is to get radar and a lock on system working in preparation for the AI.  We talked about it a bunch today in class, and Wilson and I are going to start working on the lock-on system for our next sprint once we finish the current one.

Continuing Onwards!

For our second sprint Wilson and I have been tasked with getting the screens we made in the previous sprint to actually have functionality as well as making a new pause option for the game screen.  At this point we've made progress on both counts working separately and together, although the pause screen is coming along very well and should hopefully be pretty much done.

Functionality for the options will be a bit trickier since most of those functions aren't yet in game.  We're likely going to make and use placeholders.