...re-tune your channel

....more exciting adventures in to year 3 continue on <a href="http:\\doomster73.tumblr.com">doomster73.tumblr.com<a/>

Letting them loose on it....

So yesterday, we had our first proper playtest session where the other teams got to play our games and we got to play theirs..... Eeeek.

This is a good thing as you can become blind to your own game when you are working on it and other people will see the flaws and bugs.

We set the game up so that the players got to see to key parts of the game.  The stasis section and an example actual level.

The feedback was good to get overall even though not all positive.  There are a few of main points which stuck out for me, apart from the obvious bugs we knew about, like the ladders not working.  The main point was that the game itself is too dark, as in lighting and not subject... The stasis scene is meant to be like this with the ECG light going passed to show your way.  A suggestion though was to have some kind of light around the player so he can actually see and use the ECG to see where you may want to travel too.  I like this idea.  In the main levels though, I had to agree, it was just too dark.  There definitely needs to be more ambient lighting around to show the scene itself, otherwise you just completely in the dark and keep dying.  Quite frustrating....

It was also mentioned that, because we are doing a platform game, we really need to make the character controller movement and play-ability a lot more slick.  This and the key mechanic of dying in the dark really need to be focused on and less on coming up with new design ideas for the levels.  I kind of agree as we haven't even got the basic right yet and I'm still being asked if things are possible in programming to achieve a new design idea that has been thought of.  We have been advised to lose the temporary character model and go back to just a block, as the model is distracting and nothing like the model we are hoping to have.  We have also been advised to create a new level with perhaps just one or two puzzles in that we can develop to a polished state for the vertical slice presentation.

We have a lot to think about and I hope Max can get these points across to the other guys who couldn't make the session last night.

Hmmm..... lets sort this out guys :)

Things are looking up...

So we have finally got to have a week off after our last pre-production hand in and time for a bit or R&R and what a week it's been.

I have managed to get myself a new job in the meantime.  A proper full time job back in Manchester which starts in June.  My new job is a senior developer for a huge opticians company.  The great thing about the job is that it will be coding in C# which is going to mean that I can can concentrate on my C# coding skills all the time now which is going to help the game coding no end.  There is also a fantastic opportunity to start game coding for them to as they want to introduce little games on there website which they are keen for me to start doing so it's defo a win-win-win situation for me.  It also means because it is back in Manchester that I should be less tired and have more to to concentrate on our game to :)

Before we left for the week we had a meeting to come up with the new product backlog for the production stage of the game and hopefully we shall be able to get the product pipeline running a lot smoother and not be waiting for work from other team members to be able to carry on with our own bits of work.

I'm really looking forward to getting back into the swing of things next week.

Hehehe :)

Now we get serious...

So we have got to another milestone in our project..... The end of pre-production...

The presentation has gone better than the first nightmare one.. but more of that later.

There was definitely a mad crunch period for this milestone even though the team has got a lot better at communicating and we have been doing mini update meetings every lesson and on Friday.  It still meant that the final weekend before the presentation we all we going like the clappers to get stuff done.  The technical document I put together to a lot longer than expected but got all the stuff in there.

We have has to scrap some of the design ideas due to the complexity of them and also learnt a few things on the way regarding the whole pipeline of stuff like getting the 3D model of the level done and sized correctly in 3DS before passing to Unity as it get a messy if you make alterations there.  Got to remember it's all a big learning curve anyway.  Better to makes these mistakes now than later on in the production phase.

So the presentation went well I thought.  The cost of the printing was ridonkulous.... £59 I'll have u know.  There was a bit of mix up with the girl in the printers saying it was cheaper to print in black and white, us telling her which ones to print in B&W, then her just ignoring all that and doing full colour everything... but anyway... There are not really any major documents to hand for the production phase so no more unexpected payments required....!!!  Anyway, we got them all in on time this time, which was a bonus :-)  

The other teams games were at a stage where they asked the audience for a volunteer to play test the game but I knew that ours had bugs in and it wasn't at that stage.  Also, as we were showing it we realised, the level(s) were huge and it would have taken an absolute age for someone new to it to get through it.  This isn't bad for the actual game, but for demo purposes... defo on the large side.

We'd fallen a bit behind on the art side so our game was very greyscale compared to the other teams... But no worries, we have now put Max in charge as the team leader and we are going to prioritise tasks better this time to make sure the important stuff gets done first... This obviously applies to the programming too.

So at this stage, we have just had our first production planning meeting and created our new product backlog....  When we next get together it's full steam ahead.....!!!!!

Onwards and upwards :-)

One step forward.....

So this week I decided that there is something not quite right with the combination of Unity, SVN and tortoise. It just keeps losing stuff, especially models... Which is highly annoying. So after consultation with David, we decided to give it up as a bad job for now and resort to just storing the prototype project on Googledrive for now...., not too pleased but I can't waste anymore time rebuilding stuff every time we need to work on it.

The other thing we decided is that we are just gonna add all the new from prototype 2 back into prototype 1 as this one definitely works. The code is quite messy, which is one of the things that Martin specifically told to me to be careful of, which is why I started prototype 2 from scratch. But again time is precious and we need a working prototype 2 for the second presentation.

On a positive note though I managed to build the newly designed level and throw in most of the assets the design guys wanted. There are a couple of things that doing really work but I can discuss this when we get together tomorrow at college.

I also got the the stasis ECG script back from Martin (at 4am may I add which shocked me a little as I was still out partying....) I threw it in the prototype today but it needs tweaking and my hangover wasn't being the most helpful of tools.... I'll look at it tomorrow....

Laterz.....

Wire him up, doctor....

So this week I had look into direction cameras.  They don't look too difficult but I have imported some JavaScript camera files from the Unity demo just to use for reference.  I can' actually code them just yet as I have nothing to direct the camera from and to :-/

On a positive note, got to have lesson with Martin this week, which is always a bonus, cos we just do his nut in with questions and in return he blows ours off with some holy f*** maths that even Pythagoras would squint at....  It's all helpful though.

I had some really easy questions for him to answer like why was a function running repeatedly instead of just onStart.  It confused him for while too but then when he changed it it started behaving itself.  Oh how we laughed.

As part of this weeks prototype task I wanted to have a look at getting the point light working in the stasis area of the game.  It's suppose to move work like an ECG display if you get me so that you can only see the platforms your moving against every few seconds.  A bit like this....

 
Anyway Martin was helping so the maths for this.  It involves lerping the light between points on the x axis as well as the y axis.  We managed to do the x axis and I can now build the points into a list for them to follow.  We ran out of time but Martin has got a copy of the script to have a look at the y axis bit.  He seemed to think it was very interesting what we were doing but cos it was nearly 10pm and I'd been up since 5am... my enthusiasm was some what lacking at this point so I told him I have to look at it the next day.  I have since re-read the code when I was more awake and I can now see what it's doing.  Winner !!!!

Looking forward to getting the stasis section working for the rest of the guys to see now...


Laterz....

Go on then... blame the tools...

So this week started with a disaster....  My laptop hard drive decided it was giving up the ghost so I spent all the weekend trying to image it put put on a new hard drive.... Managed to do everything but the bloody system drive..... Grrrr...  So this week has mainly been spent re-installing Windows and all the application.... So haven't got as far I had hoped with the game coding.

That said,  I have managed to now get transitioning between scenes working... kinda... with being able to carry data between them.  I have a issue with the OnMouseDown function not playing ball, even though the script is attached to a collider.  Also a script is running as if in an update function even though is it blatantly in the start function..... hmmm

I have also started to research direction cameras this week as we are going to need a couple of them in our game...

The quest continues....