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.

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.

Work Continues

Work continues on the Gravity Shift game.  I'm still working on the collision detection, but this weekend has been a little busy (since Thursday) setting up for Halloween and Murder Mystery Dinners.

But today (Sunday) will be a good working day to get some more work done.

I've been looking at the code and I really feel like I'm going to have to change quite a bit because we really want to deal with two types of objects.  The first part is already done: Gravity-affected objects.  This includes the player and any environmental object that we want to respond the change in gravity.  The second is objects that the player (and other gravity-affected objects) can run into but is a non-gravity-affected object.  And then easily have them coordinate with the level editor...

I've got my work cut out for me.

As for Git, I feel like I've gotten the kinks worked out.  There were some problems which a few of us had, but I think that it is all taken care of and it should be easy from here on out.  Whew.

Collision Detection

I'm moving onto working with the collision detection for the game.  From what Tyler was saying, he tried a simple implementation that didn't seem to work.  His ideas were about the same as what I was thinking of implementing, so I think I'm going to have to do some drawing-board work for a little bit here.

I haven't done a whole lot of coding as much as I have been pouring over the code.  Tyler had some issues that he didn't know how to address which I'm working on solving but we'll see.  I'll have some more time tomorrow to work on it and I hopefully can get some real work done.