Our Beta presentation went fairly well, despite all the obstacles that stood in our way of achieving what we wanted to achieve for that milestone. We're now on the final stretch for our game. Our final and last milestone is Gold, and it is about five weeks from now.
We have a team-on-one scheduled for this Wednesday. It will most likely be our last for the semester and the last for the team. We'll be going over exactly what needs to be done for Gold. It's our final milestone, so we've really got to make sure we know what we're doing in order to get everything done.
As I'm writing this, we're getting in the HUD finally. We have the health, icon, score, and timer displayed along with the decorative frame that goes with it. (See last week's post for pictures.) We're going to be making little tweaks to it to try to maximize the playfield, as some of the branches protrude out into the player's playing area considerably. Also, the background music demo is currently playing in the game, and it sounds quite well. I hope to make a final version before the end of the semester.
We have a new plan for sound. We are going to be trying something that works in terms of beats, and each sound will be a note of sorts. This is an idea we looked at before, but because of the technology and time, we weren't sure how to go about it or if we were going to be able to do it. However, our sound programmer managed to get Wwise into our system, and he'll be focused on that for the entirety of the time remaining. Likewise, my efforts will be largely centered around created assets for that.
Our particle physics for creating ink-like effects are still in the works, and our physics programmer is making regular iterations. We're getting a look nailed down, and it's looking better and better by the day. We're still deciding where we want to us the effect. Some of our currents ideas are to use them in place of animations for explosions (ink splatters) or to possibly attach the effect to certain enemies and let it trail behind them. Our enemies are currently the visually weakest thing about our game at the moment, so we're brainstorming things we can do to make them look better.
I've been doing miscellaneous asset work, and I've been doing a lot of concept work for new enemy AI and bullet patterns. This is the next thing we'll be tackling after getting in our multiplayer stuff, which is done but just needs to be given a UI to make it usable. For enemy AI, I'm looking into different kinds of paths that will work with the style of the game with a smooth and interesting feel. Bullet patterns are a bit more of a grey area for me, as I've been focused on the enemies, but I'll be doing more research for that in the next few days.
Some sample enemy behavior drafts.
(The X denotes player location.)
Anyway, that's where the game is at this point. We'll see what we've got planned next after our team-on-one. I'll let you know at the end of Week 10. See you then! Peace.
Sincerely,
Alicia Yeargin.
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