Its too late to pump the brakes

Team Progress

Currently we have a 32 item list of programmer tasks that still need to be done ranging from small tasks, such as changing the camera distance, to larger items like the menu system.  Our list is accomplish able, but we don't have time to waste.  This means that we need each element to be designed before we work on it, because we don't have time to throw away code at this point.

On that front, things are looking up.  We met as a group on Saturday to talk about animation progress and the art design for our menus.  In addition, today we have one last design meeting with Bob and Roger, which will hopefully end with a definitive decision in regard to all the design elements.

Personal Progress

Seeing as how my blog post was so late last week that I covered some of my items from the current sprint (rain effect), I have fewer items to talk about in this post.  I essentially spent the rest of the sprint performing tweaks to how the enemies work.  

Previously we had decided that enemies should collide with each other, this design decision was mostly made to prevent several enemies stacking on top of each other (such that you cannot tell there are multiple enemies in the same spot).  However, the collisions also mean that they block each other from attacking the player, resulting in a straight line of enemies that the player can just plow through.  To fix the problem we disabled enemy collisions and offset them on different 'tracks' such that there should be enough dimension that they don't appear to be on top of each other.  I also checked off another small feature by forcing our heavy enemy to turn slowly.  The heavy enemy is designed such that he has a shield in the front that blocks most of the damage.  You either need to get behind him or disarm him to deal max damage.  The issue was that the heavy enemy would instantly turn and face the player making it impossible to get behind him.  Overall, I didn't discover some new algorithm or program anything that was all that hard this week, but I was able to check quite a few items off the to-do list.