Tate Marske - Week 4

This week was exciting!  And by exciting, I mean very exciting!  I've finally been able to get a lot done on the coding portion of the project.

Not only did I finally actually get something happening on-screen, but I also learned how to use touch events to my advantage along with particle emitters and camera scaling to get things working properly on multiple different devices.

Although all of the assets are only mock images right now...  (Yes, our ninja is currently a soccer ball...)  The core components are actually falling into place already.  Have a look:


Shuriken-Throwing!

Here, you can see a screenshot of the player rapidly tapping the shuriken button!  Our little soccer ball is shooting!  Oh, and by the way, those shurikens are being kept track of in a varying-size arraylist.  This means that we aren't calculating any more than we need to each time through the update loop!






Next up, we have jumping!

Although this may seem like a simple implementation, it was clashing with something else, and was very hard to implement the way we originally wanted it.  Basically, the player will simply tap the bottom-right corner of his or her screen to make the ninja jump.  If you like this, you'll love the next one...







Drumroll please...
We have SWIPING!!!

Yes, it's true!  After only one week of getting some work done on coding, we've actually got a working swipe module going!  I won't go into too much detail on how the particles are being positioned and such, but it's actually a pretty interesting set of algorithms!  They still get a little broken up if the player moves their finger TOO fast accross the screen, but meh.  It still looks really cool!  And our little Toast function even tells us that it recognized a swipe!


Oh, and if all that wasn't enough for one week of work, multitouch is now working, too.  Although we don't forsee our players needing to do two things at once, we may as well give them the option to!  We don't want to frustrate anyone by limiting the application now, do we?

I'll be working hard again this week, and I'm sure I'll have some really cool new stuff to show off in the next post!