Week 7-8 : The final touches

This is polish week and almost all of what we have logged as artifacts is now within the game itself. What this boils down to is that at the moment no new systems are added, but  tweaked, updated or made to shine just a bit more (sometimes literally).
What then could there be to discuss? Quite a bit, as those tweaks tend to be what takes a game from being acceptable to being either great or awful.
For instance this week we […]

Week 6 : Beta and the re-design of UI systems

The pre-beta playtest has come and gone, lending a number of reviews with information we were mostly already aware of. However, this was still a critical event as this confirms the need for re-designing the game in some key areas, including the very system we use to move our players and let them take actions. This blog post will thus detail the design work done before the feature freeze to come, rather than the producer side of handling the beta […]

Week 5 First Animation (ever)

This week saw me taking my first steps into animation programming, resolving how to code to move a character according to input and the speed it was traveling.
Unity’s animation solution is a new type of challenge, but not entirely. It is mainly built up from State Machines https://www.techopedia.com/definition/16447/state-machine , something which a programmer might be more familiar with than an artist.  What these boil down to are devices or programs that produce a certain type of output depending […]

Week 4: Actual UI implementation, Alpha Presentation

The Alpha has come and gone , its presentation over. Feedback mainly centered around difficulty in determining which player is where and doing what, indicating our placeholder art needs to be replaced ASAP. But that would not make a very good blogpost, so here instead the project UI and where it derives its statistics are obtained. Remember that all art here is placeholder at the moment, meant only to represent what each player should see, not what they WILL see.
The […]

Week 1 and 2 of Big Game Project: Production and Design

These two weeks saw the start of a project that is to span 8 weeks of development, where I will be taking the role of Producer along with part-time Designer and Programmer. The game being made is an isometric 3D-game, tactical and turn-based. Secret agendas are a main mechanic, where-in players will be given secret objectives to complete that include betraying other players and killing them before reaching the end game. In short, the Mechanics involve Moving and Attacking enemies and allies, […]

Week 3 of Big Game Project: Early UI and what to show the player.

Beyond more production and design work, migration of systems from the prototype to an early pre-alpha build began.  Since systems were no longer being tested by internal testers, the game required an UI on both the server and client screens displaying statistics like player health, Initiative number and which attacks are selected. The transfer lead to the use of actual equipment to appear on the GGC floor where the UI appeared differently and would require different solutions.

Above is one of […]

Week 1 and 2 of Big Game Project: Production and Design

These two weeks saw the start of a project that is to span 8 weeks of development, where I will be taking the role of Producer along with part-time Designer and Programmer. The game being made is an isometric 3D-game, tactical and turn-based. Secret agendas are a main mechanic, where-in players will be given secret objectives to complete that include betraying other players and killing them before reaching the end game. In short, the Mechanics involve Moving and Attacking enemies and allies, […]

5SD046 Knytt Assignment

As part of our course in Advanced Game design, this blog will detail my work with creating a Knytt level, the parts I worked on specifically and the ones I collaborated on.
Our first day had our group of 3 brainstorming ideas of what the theme of the level would be, as well as the story being told. Our assignment prohibited us from using text to communicate with the player, and so our theme would need to be simple given the […]

5SD033 Tutorials

This week has mostly seen smaller fixes in our codebase, as we are essentially feature-frozen. However as feedback has continously asked for better explanations ingame on how to actually play the game, this post will detail how I have implemented our TutorialButton class, that will display a sprite on screen and remove it once a player presses the appropriate button. It is not a hard lesson, but there really is not much else to speak of this week as pretty […]

5SD033 Benefits of pre-loaded sprites

Most work this week has been in optimizing our game, with few new additions beyond another projectile. However, as the new projectile is mostly a re-thread of older projectile types and the EMP class mashed together, I instead chose to make this blog post about the benefits of loading sprites for projectiles before they are used instead of when they are created.
 
Crafting Bullets
When we had first started making our projectile class, we created it to hold its own sprite in […]

5SD023 Code Review of Team 9 Player(Giraffe) class

Code Review of 5SD023 Team 9’s player Class
by Karl Malm (Team 8)
This post will mainly detail the code of the Player (Giraffe) Class of Team 9’s space shooter project, found here:
https://bitbucket.org/AdLaDCLXVI/gameprogramming2_wow
General Project Status
The code at the time of writing had an error which kept me from opening it without altering the project files, most likely a merge error introduced at 2016-03-02’s update. These can be found under the #include lists in the .vcxproj and .filter files. There are more […]

5SD033 High Score Screen and Issues

This week will focus on one of the harder (to me) things to implement about our game: The High Score Screen. The screen itself was just another state to implement, but actually creating a list of scores and names that updated accordingly and displayed appropriately even after alterations was a challenge. It is not yet complete, requiring help by other coders to finish.
The current version of the high score screen, sans input
First on the agenda was deciding what format to […]