Designing the Game

Well, it's over. We did it. And, surprisingly, it turned out pretty damn good. It was fun; at least everyone who played it during the showcase seemed to think so. So yay. There are still some speed issues and a few more things to tweak, which I'm going to fix next week. When those tweaks are done, I'll release PvN: The Better Edition. Which will be better. Yes.

Thanks for the semester and all the hard work, guys. We did good.

~Will out.

Worst semester ever. I have never worked so much on a single project neglecting everything else in my life. I have become PVN. I know 95% of the code by heart; i could recite it. I can tell you why each line of code is there. I lose it all the time and start laughing for no reason. I have constant insomnia and dejavu. I fear thinking about my health and its deterioration.

one more week... we can do it.

this wasn't a joke

I found our code stats interesting and thought it would be interesting to share them with the rest of the world.

• We have 118 source files in our project, not including the map and configuration files. They total 289kb of disc space.


• We have a total of 10511 lines.
  
  
  
  • Code only: 7955 75.7%
  
  
  • Code + Comment: 291 2.8%
  
  
  • Comment Only: 881 8.4%
  
  
  • Empty: 1384 13.2%
  
  
  
  

Damn....

I just sent an email out to the team about our need to develop a real, explicit narrative for the game and implement along with our levels in the coming days.

Thus far, we have largely ignored the actual story and narrative that would push our game along. This is bad: story is good. So we need to do this.

There are still two technical holes to be filled before cutscenes are viable (script player ai trigger and message displayer), but mostly we just need to decide what we want to do and when. I'm happy to write copy for the cutscenes, Ethan can make sure the level designs are agreeable with the cutscenes we want to script, Siz can be the Fearless Leader he's supposed to be, Eugene can write player script ais, and Hugh can help us make it cool. Bosses might also need to do cool things for cutscenes, so, Hugh, let us know what we can do with that and what kinds of things you think would be cool.

Joy

So we definitly have done a considerable amount of useful work over the weekend. I am happy that we all got toghether and worked on this game. There's a considerable amount of work left, but I think that was long as we work on it consitently and without waiting for to the last minute, we should be fine. I think that the key is to avoid 20 hours marathons at CSUG until 11am in the morning. Other than being absurd and unhealthy, it puts the morale waaay down low where we don't want it. And at this point, that's the last thing we want. People should be happy and not overworked, although, I can speak for myself and the fact that my other classes are killing me. I told a friend about last weekend's marathon sessions for this course and project. His response? "What about your other classes???" Mr. Obvious says: Overworking yourself is bad.

Presenting our game

The presentation is coming up. I see the presentation as the perfect spot for us to show everyone what we're capable of doing. Embarassing as it is, we have no delievered as well as we could have during the semester. Our goal for the presentation should be to show the audience that we worked on this game hard, which we have, and that we have completed a very playable game that should provide a very fun experience. This should strech into the showcase and everyone should say "holy shit. pvn is fuckin awesome."

Levels

There's been something that I have been thinking of for quite a while, that I didn't want to trouble us with, considering our slow initial progress. In a lot of games that I have played, I remember that one of the best things was the interactivity with the levels. Climbing, stepping, bouncing, etc. Level design is of high priority for us, and with the advancement of our level code, I'd say we're ready for something nice. We have to consider that levels are a world themselves. They are alive. They are not static. This being said, I asked Will if there's an easy way in which, given the current level code, we can add moving parts to levels. The response: yes. Awesome. For the final version, look forward to waving flags, moving windmills in the ninja town (i hope), and other animations.

Enemies

Given a game of our scope, how do we create various enemies that could add a nice dimension to the game? It is quite a difficult question to answer. But we decided from the begining that the way our enemies will stand out is not their dramatic visual difference, but their AI. The enemies, are in essence, the same as our characters. However, each type specializes in a different skill. Pirates and Nnjas. There's aggresive pirates and ninjas. There's defensive pirates and ninjas. There's suicidal pirates and ninjas. Visually, we used the Adobe Photoshop suite and ran our character images through some filters. That has resulted in some pretty interesting images, which I think we could still work on. But overall, I'm very satisfied with them.

Yes. Tomorrow from noon-midnight, CSUG. Sunday from noon-2am, CSUG. Productive weekend? I think so. We're going to tweaking AI, adding more enemies, setting up the levels, enemies, bosses, items, etc. It should be a lot of... fun. ;)

Here's an interesting situation. Will has source. Will has configuration files. Will has most recent version. Will sends most recent version out. Szymon compiles Will's code. Szymon unzips all of the content files into their proper directories. Szymon builds successfully. Szymon runs the game and receives tons of errors that Will doesn't receive. Will can run game and play into the second level. Szymon can't make it to the loading screen. Fuck.

I guess I was overly optimistic about this one. Man, that was a rough day. Over the weekend we spent so much time just working on this thing all day and night, working and trying to make this work. Staying up for more than 20 hours had its toll on me. At 7am I started doing stupid mistakes in every line of code; I couldn't concentrate. I got dizzy on my walk back home. Damn game programming is exhausting...