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...