Lock On!

For our latest sprint, I've been tasked with implementing the target lock and pod tracking system for our game, and it's turning out to be a doozy. We were initially thinking that we would allow the player to toggle between the five targets nearest to her, but what I've implemented of that do far seems a little impractical. It would involve a huge amount of iteration, cross-checking, and updating of player history, and I'm just not sure it will be practical. Jason suggested that, for now, we just target between the nearest and next nearest ships. This will move the number of iterations through ships down to one, and will take a lot less time to implement. Now we've just got to sell the rest of the team on it. Perhaps we'll flesh it out next semester when we have more time.

More Pos Screen

The pause screen is fairly near working at this point, but there is an odd error that occurs when you enter the Options Screen through the Pause Screen and then exit back to the Pause Screen. It's display a large, brown... graphic. Anyway, once we figure that out, we're going to make the sound options functional - so you can turn the music and the sound effect up and down. We probably need to take out the screen resolution changes too, since those don't make much sense for a console game.

Controller Screen

On Tuesday Jason and I focused on implementing the control customization screen. As it stands, we are going to have several per-made control schemes that the player can choose from. We made it so they can change the scheme along the bottom of the screen, and the controls mapped to the buttons update according to the scheme. Next we are going to put some finishing touches on the screen, decreasing the font and fine-tuning the layout of the button labels, as well as making the options chosen there and in the option screen actually holding throughout the rest of the game. I fell like we have a direction now, and we're getting stuff done. I initially felt like a slacker because I wasn't doing anything, but since I have specific tasks assigned I feel much more comfortable in the team.

Options Screen

We finally got to work this weekend, with some fairly satisfying results. Jason and I were made responsible for implementing the options screen, including control customization. We still need to implement the latter, but the general option screen is fairly well done - though we do still need to discuss with the group how to handle the option variables (we'll probably want them held in the screen manager). The option screen needs both sliders (for sound) and the ability to scroll left-right through 3 options (low, med, high), resolutions, etc. The graphics are preliminary, but we set the layout up in such a fashion that it will be easy to modify as the graphics change.