Final Presentation and Voting

Well, the presentations are over and I'm both relieved and disappointed. What started out looking like solid progress ended up looking pretty lame next to what other groups had to show. In the end our game just didn't stand up against the others. Part of me is a little bitter, because while we wrote all the code for our prototype, it's fairly clear that many of the other teams basically just used stuff that was already created. Not that I can blame them, since that was the point of the prototype.

I just hate feeling like our game got a short schrifft - having a team with only three people in it to beginning with, but ending up with only two people actually working on it just wasn't enough. CP said he had some family stuff come up, but he ended up not even coming to the presentation - which I guess I'm fine with since he didn't do anything for it.

Anyway, after this post I'm moving on. I find myself being way too emotional about this whole thing, and I don't want that to cause me to put less than my all into the next project. I'm not expecting ours to be chosen, so I'm putting it behind me.

One more weekend

And I have no idea how we're going to do it. I suppose that the random level generation is nearly good enough to present, and the equip screen is nearly perfect for the presentation, but then there are the battle scenes showing the unique character spells - something that I'm supposed to do this weekend. Thing is, I have a big homework assignment(I finished the other big one early) due the same day, as well as a test the day after and another presentation for a class(same day) and a super-urgent project I have to spend time on for work. I guess this is what I signed up for, but what a perfect storm. I hope that I can make something good enough to get our game through to full production though - it deserves it.

Arguing about gameplay

I started this post last week, but it wouldn't let me do more than write the headline on my phone. We argued for a while last Tuesday about adding a "hook" to the game, and I played my standard role of contrarion. Oh well. I got my point across. C.p. suggested that we add in a crafting system and gave us a demonstration of some mining game with a really intense crafting system. From the beginning I didn't feel very comfortable with the idea of implementing something similar in our game, but it took me a while to get around to the "why."

Eventually I figured out that I was uncomfortable because I felt adding something like that would take away from what the game was about - gear acquisition and levelling. I felt that adding an intense crafting element would make the game something else altogether. Mainly this is because there are two options with the crafting - if you make it so that nearly everything must be crafted, our game would force players to craft hundreds of items each trip down into the dungeon, making the same weapons on each trip. The other possibility would be that it would be so rare that there'd be no point in adding it in.

In the end, we came to a compromise though: now players can craft items, but they don't actually touch the materials to do so - the game lets them disassemble items and then just tells them what they can make and they can select what they'd like to make. This keeps the crafting system useful but more cleanly integrated into the game.

For Today, the 18th:
Jason and I are doing another marathon day at the lab, getting the equip screen "working". It's just hacked left and right, but ingeniously so. I'm doing most of the graphic work for the screen, since we haven't seen CP since Tuesday and haven't received anything from him yet. I really hope that we can get some nice artwork in here.

We are trying to make it so we can show of the spell individualization, the combination spells, and eventually the combat - which we're likely just going to have to fake in a video editing software. Anyway, we're getting closer and closer. I really hope our game gets chosen because I want to play it!

First Steps

Jason and I started in on the game this morning and worked from about 10am to 6.5pm. We got the random generation of the level set up, and got a bunch of placeholder graphics in. CP says he's got some graphics, so I'll see about adding them in on Monday if he gets them to me. We had the strangest bug with updating the monsters' random movement. Perhaps we had too many monsters on, or perhaps we're just missing something small, but we worked on it for a good amount of time.

We'll be working on more next weekend on getting the equipment screen set up and fixing the movement. Then, hopefully, we'll get the combat going the final weekend. Otherwise, we'll just have to fake something.

Getting the Ball Rolling

So I wound up on Jason's team, which is nice because not only to we work really well together, but I also like the game idea. Our other partner is C...P? I think his name is? I'll have to ask. Anyway, we discussed a lot of things on Tuesday. We were trying to work on the prototype, but we kept getting sidetracked by the vision of the whole.

Regardless, CP is'a be working on getting some placeholder art to populate our prototype(stairs, chests, monsters, and a player character. Jason and I will be working on the programming this weekend (should take 5-10 hrs). For the prototype we are keeping each "level" fairly non-descript, and they will just fill the screen. We're just going to try and get functionality for spawning mobs and chests randomly within the grid of the level, get the stairs working to populate new levels, and get some sort of battle system and equipment going on. (Okay, maybe 15-20hrs).