on the Xbox

Kind of a short update this week (things are a little hectic as it is the last week of school) but a great update nonetheless.  We were finally able to get the dreamspark + xbox accounts working and Scott got our game playing on his xbox.  It looks great and we are getting great frames.  In other news we are also looking really good for our alpha cutoff, I got the particle FX system in the engine (needs small tweaks) I also have all of the code for our ranged missile shooting enemy, I just need to tie it all together.  Alpha, here we come.

A huge success

What a productive week.  I got our AI working now, rather than floating through the air our small enemies now run at the player and jump at them to attack.  No damage is being done yet, but since Shandice will be done with the attacking and health system tomorrow that will be put in next week.  In addition, I also worked on a particle FX engine.  It is looking very nice, and I will probably be putting out a how to guide next week after the thanksgiving chaos is over and I have a little more time.

A Rough week

So the goal of our sprint this week was for the level editor to be in a working state so that Jake could start using it.  My job was to get enemy spawns triggering and to have a basic AI system (so that we could see enemies running at the player).  I had a little bit of success, and a little bit of failure.  After having a lengthy back and forth with Scott over how to implement spawns, I threw out the code I had and was able to come up with a triggering system that allows us to spawn x number of actors at a set frequency.  It needs some optimization as I was experiencing some frame drops on my computer when the first actor was created, but it is a start.  AI is still a work in progress, I haven't dug into the physics engine enough yet so I took some preliminary stabs at implementations.  I was able to get moving enemies, but was having issues with gravity no longer being applied.  Unfortunately at this point my laptop that I am developing on decided that it wanted to die.  The time it took to compile, run, and load the level jumped from ~45 seconds to ~5 minutes.  I continued to try to chug away on it (since I was staying up for the nexus 4 release anyway, which I didn't even get :( ) but after another couple hours it was completely unbearable.

Status for this sprint: Close, but no cigar.

Halfway Update

On Thursday we will be at roughly the halfway milestone for our Alpha, and we still have a lot to do.  When you look at the list it is quite daunting (Particle FX and AI among other things), but the list needs to be taken with a grain of salt.  Many of the features left are much smaller features than massive level editor we have been working on so far.  When you think of Artificial Intelligence, you think of complicated difficult code, but since we are only moving in two dimensions (think Mario  and have separate combat and platforming sections it will be a much simpler system than a full 3D AI.  We also talked with the designers last Thursday and came up with a solution to the music system that takes a lot of pressure off of us, but makes the level design a little more time consuming (not much though).  Furthermore, several of the other items only need to be basic for our alpha in December.  So while it does look grim if you look at the percentage of tasks done, what really needs to be looked at is the percentage of work done, and on that front we are in much better shape.