Help Tips!

Last Friday Jason and I worked together to get the help tips working in our game. I'm actually fairly proud of the system that we set up, which allows for fairly easy addition. Anyway, that Friday we managed to get the windows and the text up for the tips. The next day I was able to extend that further to provide functionality for cancelling tips, along with graphics for the button options available through the help tips system. Finally, I added in the associated images for most of the tips.

Soon after that we started play-testing. We had 5 people and they gave some good feedback. It was very clear; however, that my group doesn't have much experience with such situations. I wasn't expecting it, but it seems that my Usability Studies class I took at USU really helped me know what to look for, what to ask, and how to act. Anyway, I felt useful - which is hard with James and Felix doing so much.

Since then I've just been adding in tool-tips as needed (like for the different tactical pods) and touching things up with the help tips, though it does need to be worked on a bit more.

Sometimes I feel like this isn't really my game, due to sometimes having my tasks done before I could get to them, or having them redone without notice, but having put in both the smart-lock and the help-tips - both of which make huge gameplay differences - I do sometimes feel like I've contributed substantially.

And Now

Today I've been working on some cosmetic touch-ups for our beta release today. I simplified the controllers screen in the options menu to take out the ability to customize controls, I added everyone to the credits screen, including your illustrious selves, and I added the ability to look at the controls from the pause menu.

Since Then

So last week I helped Jason with making the turrets for the capships draw, rotate, and fire at the player. It's been slow going, and a lot of our work has been impeded pending on knowledge from the artists, since each turret has to be drawn on a bone they add to the models in Maya. We also worked on (and are still working on) making sure that the turrets can actually be targetted. That has been the hardest part, since that means they have to play nice with the classes we have that manage the enemy ships.

Menu and HUD Tweaks

Feb 10-22
This week Jason and I worked together to get the HUD elements title-safe (which, it turns out, we didn't do very well and need to work on more today). We were assigned to make the font something more spacey-looking, but somebody beat us to that. We also got the reset function in the pause menu to work correctly.

We also fixed the time element of the HUD so that it started when a new game started instead of just counting how long the game had been running. We spent some time trying to get it formatted correctly as well, but were unable to. Of course, it was some simple fix for James, who had some experience with the formatting of strings.

Also, I was tasked with coding the giant energy balls that our 2nd capital ship and our heavy fighters shoot. This is where things started to get a little tough for me. Since I had spent most of our time working on the screens and HUD, I didn't have a very clear idea of what the actual game code did. This made this task the hardest of them. I coded up something that I thought would work, but didn't know how to put ships into the level so that I could test it. I committed my code for the day at that point and let the team know where I was. When I next heard about it, Felix had moved the code around, and almost completely rewritten it. Since I was already unsure of myself with respect to the game code, this kind of struck a nerve and made me feel kind of ...ancillary to the group. Since then I've seen that my code is actually still there, but I've had a hard time feeling very committed to the game since. Though I've tried to complete my tasks, I probably haven't put in as much time as I should have - a fact that I hope to rectify during the testing process, which I have some experience with.

Something Useful

Feb3-10
This is the week in which I actually contributed something that I'm proud of to our game - our aim assist feature. I got some help from James on the structure of the code, but on the whole it was my baby. The aim assist makes it so that once you lock onto a ship, if you move your crosshairs near them, they will snap to the lead brackets of the targetting system. It's set up so that the crosshairs can direct where the lasers are shooting, but only if they're within a certain angle from the forward vector of the ship. If the player fails to keep up with its target, or when the target is close-by and therefore moving very quickly(in an angular sense), then the assist will fall off. I also created our credits screen.

More Travels in 4.0

Jan 27-Feb 3
We worked on porting the particle engine code over to 4.0, which was a lot of work and made the code much more simple. We spent a while trying to find out what happened to render states before just finding the 4.0 version of the code we were trying to fix. Standard stuff. Still, we got it all ported over, but didn't really have any effects to show it off, since they had been taken out so as not to break the 4.0 code.

Next Slide

Jan 20-27
We continued working on porting code over. I moved the target system over and meshed it with the rest of the code, then worked with Jason to bring the HUD items over. We also added the display for the pods, which took quite a bit of work because of the way the HUD had to received information from the player ship. We used some of the HUD graphics to schmancy up the pause screen as well.

Time to play catch-up

I know we joked about back-filling blogs to make it appear that we'd done them on time, but I don't have the heart for the deception right now. I got out of the habit of updating the blog, and since the programming this semester has been so much less... contained, it's hard to feel like I've done much of anything concrete enough to write about anymore. Still, here are my reports of what I did during specific weeks and sprints.

Jan13-20
During our first month back from the holiday break, we focused mainly on getting our code ported over from 3.1 to 4.0. Felix ported the main components of the code over and cleaned out any unneccessary code. That first week, I was responsible for going through the screens Jason and I had created and taking out extraneous code. We also underwent a revision of the scope of our game, deciding to make it more arcade-like and less mission-based, so Jason and I changed up the menus to reflect the new options on the main menu. We also went through the options screen and took out a lot of the options (like resolution) that we didn't really need.