Mike Pope - Week 13

Jumping straight in again, a lot has been going on for everyone during this point in the project. Unfortunately, in order to meet a beta deadline in the next 2 weeks, we are in the need of cutting and replacing some original ideas that we had. This includes things from extra features to extra levels. It stinks, but that's what happens. Anyways, here's a nice list of my accomplishments in this week that went by super fast:

Outlined Chin & Enemies For Easy Visibility
Chin Roll & Stealth Sprite Sheet
Egypt 3-1 (Desert with pyramids)
Egypt Platforms (Highly reminiscent of Super Mario Bros. 3, world 2 blocks)
Pass Screen
Fail Screen
World Select (and buttons)
Level Select  (and buttons)
Large Samurai (90% Textured - just needs sprite sheets)

You must be thinking, "What's left to finish?" Well, there's a pretty decently sized list of final art assets that I need to create, such as the rest of Egypt, two levels for Hawaii, and changing up of Asia 1. From here, there's about 2-3 extra assets that need to be created for our levels, as well. While it's hard to juggle all of these responsibilities with classes and work, It's honestly not a lot once you start working on something... you can get everything done quite fast! (Like I did with this past week).

For the remainder of this week, we will be implementing the rest of these assets to finish out our game. Next week we will be focusing on polishing up our game, and hopefully ironing out some kinks we've been having with multiple platforms. It's going to be amazing once it's all together. Trust me.

Andrew Morrison - Update 2

You will have to forgive my absence from this blog.  The past two pieces have been coming together pretty slowly, and that has taken the majority of my time and mental power.  But anyway, the level 2 music has been fully completed and implemented into the game.

As of now, the music for levels 3 and 4 are sitting at roughly 70% completion, and I intend to knock those out, as well as new sound effects for the sword slashing, shurikens, and enemy abilities, as well as the rolling and stealth sound effects tonight.  Due to size constraints, we will be reusing the menu music (how much of it will honestly be heard on the menu?) for the final level, as I feel it will be suitable for the conclusion of the game.

After tonight, the rest of the sound effects, level completion, and jumping, will be completed by this weekend.  This will make everything easier on Tate as he will not have to scramble at the last minute to get my assets implemented.

http://morrisongaming.weebly.com will be updated more this week as the remaining background music is completed.

-DM

Tate Marske - Weeks 11-12.5

Summing this three-week span up into one word; long.  I have been absolutely working my tail off trying to get everything working perfectly for further level integration, and we are just about there.  Since my last post, my team and myself have accomplished a lot, and gone to new heights!  So, here is what's going on right now:

Overview:
 - I've gotten Mike's basic enemy working with some very simplistic artificial intelligence at this point
 - Thanks to this, I've been able to test and rework some aspects of slicing with the sword and throwing shurikens, which will be two main attacks within the game.  All systems are go here!
 - World selection and level selection have both been worked in this week, which is HUGE.
 - The game is now capable of saving and loading progress.  This is a huge step in the right direction, and has been tested on quite a few devices now.


Details:
Basic Enemy:  This guy was fun to work with, and now that he's implemented, it makes the game a lot more fun, and gives it a hook.  Although it may seem counter-intuitive to only have basic AI working at this point, that's all we need.  Since the level is flying by you rather quickly as you run, you don't want complex things to have to compute in your mind as you try to avoid 'smart' enemies.  These guys basically sit and wait, and throw a single shuriken at you each, once you come within a range.

Here, you can see that I'm in a rather tight situation, while testing this out!  I've just sliced through one enemy, right next to my character, with the sword.  However, the enemy above has anticipated my arrival and thrown a shuriken my way!  I had better time my jump well!



Slicing and Throwing:  Nothing much visual I can really put here, but I've been working hard on making sure slicing and throwing shurikens work accurately.  Over the course of the next day or two, I plan on getting a new ability integrated, too!

World Selection and Level Selection:  Okay, so...  This should have been something done very early on, right?  Well, I needed more than one testable level to properly integrate this, so I did have to wait a while.  However, this proved to be a huge challenge.  I had to completely rework and restructure certain portions of my code in order to make sure you could smoothly transition through levels in general and then quit the game, reload it, and pick an unlocked level.

The world select screen and level select screens work together flawlessly now.  Variables are passed back and forth and read / written to a file, which I will talk about soon, so that the proper buttons become clickable and readable at the right times.  Pretty nifty, eh?

Saving Progress:  This is another thing that may seem trivial to some.  Well, it was my first time doing anything like this, so it was rather rough and strenuous!  Thanks to the help of my professor and a lot of research and debugging sessions with different devices, I was able to overcome my issues with this.  I had to reconfigure which screens were able to read and/or write from/to this file, and when it was able to happen.  Right now, it saves out a simple text file...  Hopefully in time I am able to change the type so that it is less-easily manipulated.


Plans for the next few days include getting another ability to work, and integrating Kyle's newest level designs.  I must absolutely perfect everything in what I already have before I implement it into new levels, so I'll be excited to see how everything fits together!


Just a bit of recap for you:

In thirteen weeks, we have successfully transitioned from this:

To this:

Mike Pope - Week 12

Hello again!
I'll go straight into this week's post by saying that we're just about half way done with our Beta version, and we've got this far within only 12 weeks (and we still have 4 to go!!). In these next 3 or so weeks, we're all going to be working double hard, especially me, but we'll talk about that later.

Rock cliff Formations

This last week I finished up the backgrounds for the Madagascar World, which was a very fun set of levels to design. I started off in a somewhat sun-setting, kind of sparse, savanna. After that, it the player ends up in one of the "rock forests", running on top of rock formations which is just in between the savanna and the deep dense jungle. Would you like to take a guess at what's next? That's right! A deep jungle setting! This level is really all trees, of a bunch of different types. There'll definitely be a lot of obstacles on this level, I can tell you that.

This next week is going to prove quite difficult, but I know we can manage just fine. Since there's only 3-4 weeks left, we want to leave those last 2 or so weeks open for polishing our current game and other things involving the game (like website, trailer, etc.). For these next two weeks I need to complete world 3 and 4, and potentially a special end level ;). With these, I also need to finish up the character/enemy assets by getting the power-ups for Chin, and finishing the animations for the Armored Samurai. On top of this, I need to create the rest of the menu assets (which I hope to do in the next few weeks). We're almost there!

Fat Ninja

Kyle Windsor - Week 12

This week proved a surprise to me.  I had business that took me out of town so I made preparations to accomplish my work away.  The problem though, is that for Fat Ninja to compile, you need an internet connection even if the ADT is referenced locally.  As such, I have been unable to complete any levels this week.  As soon as this is done being typed I hope to work on a level tonight and tomorrow morning so I can hopefully have one level done for tomorrow.

I did manage to complete a couple new levels from world 3 though.  This will lighten the work load a little bit for this upcoming week which means I can hopefully be able to complete my leftover work from last week.  My worst case scenario is I can't accomplish any of my left over work for the next 3 weeks.  All told, this isn't the end of the world though because week 7 is when we are aiming to be done, fully built and finished.  But week 7 is still a week that can have work done in it so if through some issue or another, I am unable to complete a level until week 7, missing a day from it won't impact our schedule too greatly.

Mike Pope - Week 11

Hey guys!
This past week I was pretty much focuses on getting all of the current art assets polished up for our first bug testing run! So far, we have 4 complete levels, and that means all 4 levels needed to look spot on, with no glitches or errors going on (like un-even tiling/repeating or line breaks). What's very interesting is that on one phone, none of the above stated ever happened... but on other phones (like mine) there'd be line breaks ALL OVER THE PLACE!

Anyways, I was able to finish up the first level of our second world, Madagascar 2-1 this week. The original concept of this map was to have Chin end up running on top of the trees. There needs to be a lot of extra programming behind that, so I'm not too sure if that is plausible at this point. If not, it still works great as a floor running map... like our previous levels. Also, I started working on a samurai character, which will be pretty large compared to the rest of the enemies (and will be used much later in the game). From here on out, I am going to be working extremely hard on creating fresh, new levels for the remaining many that we have planned. Until next week!

Kyle Windsor - Week 11

This week has gone great  for me.  With the exception of a couple issues early on, I have made great progress. Early on, when I hadn't looked at the code much, I was getting some errors and issues.  But within about an hour I found out what caused them all, and I could read the code sufficiently to negate them all.

As for my work, I have completed 3 levels this week, as in I have debugged and tested them so that they are in Fat Ninja.  Only the last level I did, world 2 area 1, needs more work and that's because enemy types and terrain obstacles aren't in and will need to be placed.  But this can be done at a later time and should take a fraction of the time it took me to do the levels.