Designing the Game

More things have been added by yours truly this fine day. I guess my best work went into a skill that the pirate is going to have. At some point, the pirate will be able to scream into the sky and have a huge flock of 50+ parrots descend onto an enemy and massacre that enemy. The actual animations look decently. A flock of parrots descends and circles the enemy in a nice wave pattern and then the HP just goes DOWN. I wrote a nice function disband, in which each parrot flies out of the view of the screen and then gets destroyed. The disbanding looks really cool. The actual flying into, etc, looks decently, but needs some work.

I'm also currently playing with a Loading screen and making sure our save/load option will be available. We decided to drop the going back through levels idea, because it would cost too much resources which we do not have. Plus, level code is backed up, so we're kinda holding many level ideas back.

Lots of work being done.

# posted by siz @ 11:53 PM 0 comments

Little time left, lots of work to do. I guess we kinda skipped through some thought process before we decided to venture on this project. I really thought it was doable, but, as the development progressed, I have realized that the project is a LOT of work. The smart thing would be to have done some kind of complex puzzle game whose core could be implemented in a simple way. For example, both the Sydonis group and the Pandemonium group have done this kind of project, and they're doing very well.

I also feel a bit disadvantaged in that neither of us has had much exposure to C++, whereas the Pandemonium group, for instance, has six people that seem out of which I know three have done coops (one for IBM and two for MS). And the rest are great programmers. But I'm not picking on them at all; I admire their work. They've done an amazing work with the MVC design, their game has progressed very well through the prototypes and into the alpha version and they have room for tons of tweaks and improvements. They were smarter than us in the choice of game idea. So I guess what I'm saying is that the teams' balances are not truly existent, and that most, if not all, people in our group have not had experience with large projects and lack a feeling of how long things take to get done.

This project has been a learning thing, more than anything else. As group leader I feel that the work we do and whatever we achieve will eventually come back to me and that I'm somehow responsible for the team's effectiveness and the resulting product. This, for the purpose of this class, should not be the case. Everyone's got classes, everyone's got prelims, I'm taking 22 credits and all of us are overworked. It's exhausting.

Nonetheless, I'm still confident in our ability to finish this game. This weekend will be real crunch time. I have a prelim tomorrow so I can't dedicate as much time ot this project as I would like. But it's gonna be done.

# posted by siz @ 10:44 AM 1 comments