Finishing up the HUD and beyond

I'm still finishing up the HUD.  I'm having trouble getting the actual HUD to move along with the camera.  Right now it seems to just be printing to the screen and staying in the same place.  Hmmm...

After I'm done, I'm just need to start working on the doors (sliding tiles that only are affected by up/down or left/right gravity.  That shouldn't be too bad.

Snow Snow.... Where's the Snow?

So it looks like they canceled school...  And today was the day we were planning our relaxing party.  Oh well.

I've been giving the task of working on the HUD.  My problem lies in that our most resent copy of our project won't run.  We are missing some files from others and it's making it hard to really test anything when the program won't run.  I hope that everything gets submitted soon so I can get back to work.  I don't know how much time I will have over the break to get work done so it'd be nice to have it working today.

While I was working on the HUD, I thought that it would be a good time to look at the backlog for the HUD.  I know, I'm super smart.  Sadly, what I found was:

HUD.

Hmm... Guess that I'm going to have to make due with figuring out exactly what we want on there...

And on a side note... where's the snow?

Good Sounds vs. Sounds Good

So the first of the sounds is running.  I figured that I would work on getting all the content loaded (which took a little bit of time.  It's been a while since I did sound in XNA) but a few Google searches later, and we got the most important sounds started although we only have one sound actually playing in-game.  But more will come when I get some time tonight and tomorrow morning... hopefully.

The game is really coming along.  Most of the team is working on the level editor and it really came alive yesterday.  We met during and after class across the hall and spent a few hours getting some real work done.  We're going to have actual gameplay to show off on Thursday, and it's felling like it's about time.  We have been focusing on all the invisible (-to-the-player) stuff like the level editor that it's nice to have some real work to show for it.  Whew.

Sound

I've been put on sound.  We've had some great sound made by our artists, and I'll be adding them into the game.  I think that it's not going to be too hard, but I've been getting some great input from my other teammates.

Some of the important things that I heard were making sure that the sounds didn't line up in a row.  That can be a problem if there are a lot of sounds that come at about the same time.  Listening to a sound happen seconds after the actual part of the game that makes it would be confusing.  Other things include having the previous sound end so that a new sound can start and not be interrupted. We'll have to see how this really turns out.  I don't see it taking too long, but who knows.  We already found out that we have to use XNA 4.0 and who knows how many problems we might run into from that.  This'll be an interesting sprint...

Dropbox Tutorial

To make everything easy for our artists and programmers collaborating, here's a simple tutorial on how to link up to the shared folder:

1. Visit www.dropbox.com and download the software to your computer.
2. Install the software and choose where you want to place the folder.  The default on PC is My Documnets/Dropbox.  Use the free (2GB) choice.
3. If you don't see the Gravity Shift folder in the Dropbox folder, go to dropbox.com again and look in the "Sharing" tab.  If you don't see an invitation to the folder, email Morgan or Curtis and we can send you the invite again.  
4. Click accept on the invitation.  You should now see files downloading to your computer.
5. The folder is named "Game Music." Just change that to "Gravity Shift" or whatever will help you remember what is in there. 
6. Buy Morgan a Snickers.

Naming Conventions and the EVIL Checklist

The sound conventions are up and ready.  I've been talking a lot with the artists (mostly Steven and Lukas) and we've come up with some good stuff.  We may not have it all, but from what we've got, we can organize most everything... at least everything that we already have.

We've gone through the work our artists have done, and it rocks.  We've converted the names to keep everything in order.

The Evil Checklist:

Now that is taken out of the way, I'm going to be our resident Evil Checklist Specialist.  It doesn't sound too exciting, but I know it's important.  Let the good times roll.

Presentation, Collision and Sound

Our group got to talking and we feel like the presentation went pretty well.  We've been spending some time working together which has been a huge help.

I was having a lot of trouble with the collision detection for a while though.  Even now, it's been a little crazy acting.  For the demo, we got the collision to be EXTREMELY basic so it wasn't that interesting to look at.  We've been claiming that the way it works wasn't a bug... it was a feature.  Curtis and I were working on it trying to find the difference in the midpoint of each of the objects that were colliding, but since we were having some of that not working, we, for the demo, just had it jump back to where it was before the collision with a new velocity of (0,0).  Then gravity would just start taking affect again.

When it's coming strait on, it just looks like it's bouncing, but at any angle, it looks like it sticks.  For the demo that was fine, but our next skirmish will bring a much better detection.

One of the projects that I've been put on is helping the artists with keeping organized.  Part of that consists of getting the artists to collaborate with files, the other is keeping those files organized, including file names.  After speaking with Steven and Lukas, we started on a simple naming convention and we'll start implementing it over the weekend.

I really do think that moving to weekly pushes is going to help us stay focused.  Most of our work was done in the few days before our goals need to be done, so cutting that time down is really going to help us work productively and output a great game.

Collision Reworking

So it seems like collision detection has unearthed some other major projects.  Yay!  The code for collision detection "should" work, but when it came time to test it, we ran into some really hefty snags.  See, here was the problem:

We had three classes: GenericObject, PhysicsObject and Player (whose parent was PhysicsObject).  The problem lies in that PhysicsObjects are abstract so we'd have to create another class to inherit from Physics to do some work.  That would work, but then it caused some issues with detection of collisions. So some reworking of our structure is the next big step.  We have a plan which will make it much easier (using inheritance for different types of objects) and make collision a breeze, but it'll take a day or two to implement.

I never thought that making a working game would really be this consuming.  I think for the most part, we are going to be behind for Thursday (at least with collision...  the rest seems pretty close), but in the end, all the work we are doing now is going to make an AWESOME game.  Each of us really gets excited about working on it and being able to see our progress really makes a difference.