Moving the HUD around

The HUD seems to have gotten in the way of gameplay.  So I'm fixing it.  Originally I tried this idea:

but that didn't really seem to help with gameplay.  It easily got in the way and so I moved it around.

It looks much better, but there is still some work to be done.  Lives is going to be moved to the bottom-right corner because the middle seems odd.  And instead of lives as a number, it's going to be changed to little smiley faces (five if you have five lives, etc.).  I still think that some art for the HUD might look cleaner, but we're going to have to wait and see what problems we need to fix first.  We should be getting some good feedback from the beta testing.

Naked without Internet

I spent this weekend in St. George and I thought I would have Internet access.  I was wrong.  I ended up working on something that I wasn't assigned, but still needed to get done.

When the player finishes a level, there is little information about what the score is and how that translates to stars.  I've been implementing it to show the player how well they did.

Mute broken

We had some mute stuff working a few weeks ago, but it's broken.  I'm working on fixing that within the menu, although there is some debate on whether or not it's needed.  I figure that if the player wants to mute, they'll do it on the TV instead of going through the menu.

I'm pretty sure that in the end, this is going to be scrapped.

Showing you Skills

I've been put in charge of showing the actual score in the game.  I thought that it would be nice to be able to have three separate scores, one for time, one for collectibles, and one for deaths.  This can effectively make each level 3 levels.  The player can play the level for different reasons and each of them changes the gameplay enough to keep you entertained for more time.  

I'm working on showing each score (0-3 stars for each score) and putting them on the selection screen for the levels.  I've got it working, but it's starting to look REALLY cluttered.  We're going to have to talk about how we will change that.  

Fixing our Collectables

I've been taking out the apples.  They don't seem to fit the gameplay and I'm coming up with some other stuff.  Diamonds and Gems is the first thing that I'm coming up with.

We're chuggin' along!

Tetris

This week has been busy with tasks but I feel like our game is really coming along.  We were each tasked with making new levels.  The more we make, the more fun this game is going to be.

One of the things that I heard from people when they were playing our game is how much they liked the Pac Man level.  They said that it was a great idea and that we could really use old games as a great start to playing this game.  So low and behold, a genius idea:

That's right.  Tetris. Pure awesomeness.

So for the most part, I got it all done.  I'm still working on the menu placement stuff.

A Busy Week Ahead

After sifting though the grad student suggestions and going through what we wanted to work on, this is my list of things I'll be working on to get done by Tuesday.

1. Make a disappearing particle effect trail that follows the player.

2. Make one level using the level editor. 

3. Define some rules that should work for scoring

4. Make all backgrounds a solid black.

5. Make the menu placement stuff relative to screen size. NO Hard coded values.

6. Change any hazard that moves to be a circle.

It is a little eclectic but it's a good list.     

Grad Suggestions

The game playing went well.  We got a lot of great feedback which will help us to make the game much better.  Here are the suggestions that we got:


-All levels should have a plain black background. It was a full room consensus that having some abstract thing in the background was distracting and didn't bring anything to the game itself

-Couple things on the HUD. Number one thing they voted out on was the arrow. They would rather see some in-game representation of this rather than looking at the HUD. They also voted it was hard to see with the way its situated currently. Some sort of bar on top would prevent the HUD images meshing with the leve. Also, it was mentioned that the lives was interesting but none of the other HUD displays give the same experience

-They liked our character design but they want see some animations and character reactions. I think we have tthis one covered in our plans.

-Zoom was pretty much voted out, but I personally think the option shouldnt be taken out. We need to definitel zoom the default camera out just a bit though.

-Level Design, they mentioned we should avoid pits, like the Cogs level and keep most of the longer falls to just be horizontal instead of vetical.

-they mentioned that particle effects would be cool when the player grabs a gem or dies. I think we could fake this pretty easy, but it should be low priority at the moment.

-They wanted to see some cool effects on the walls, like a slow pulse or moving light or something to make it seem like its alive. This is also low priority

-They wanted to see our controls fixed for the joystick and dpad, but I fixed that today(I hope)

-They felt the menus were boring. I know this is still a work in progress but we should keep this in mind. Also, we need to make all menus relative to the resolution. The current menus looked awful on the big screens with the way we have written the code so far.

-Pause menu, the wanted to have it placed on top of the game so they don't feel like they got torn out for such a simple menu. This should be pretty easy to fix

-Static hazards should never look like moving hazards. They really didn't like this

-Scoring didn't make sense. This makes sense since we haven't defined any rules for it.

-They all pretty much liked the idea of a 1/2 a second death effect(See above) With the camera moving back to the start point before spawning rather than snapping back.

Music and Sound

So the sound is in.

The only problems that I am running into is that the music is very limited.  At this point we only have a menu music and a game music.  Nothing else.  I don't want the music to sound repetitive so I think that we're going to have to get some more, but when it comes to sound, sometimes more is more (as apposed to less is more)

Now onto the new sprint.  I'm sad that I couldn't hear from the masters students, but I think we had 2 people that could go and I'm hoping for some great input from them.

Back to Sound

I'm back on sound.

After our demos in class the other day, a lot of the things that people talked about were our sounds.  We hadn't implemented music into the game.

So for this weekend, I'm working on adding music and adding any sounds that we already have that we haven't actually put into the game yet.  I don't think that's going to be too hard, but I'm going to have to try and find a happy medium where the player isn't inundated with superfluous sounds.  I'll focus on the music and simple collision sounds for now.