One last huge tweak

So its been a while, but boy has a lot changed.  After 2 testing sessions on our game (one with the masters students, one with industry pros) we received a lot of feedback.  Throughout it all we heard the same thing from almost everyone:

"Gameplay should be more music based since you are using the guitar."

So that is what we are giving them.  We have redesigned the game such that there is a constant beat that the player must follow.  Twice a second an indication will appear, at which point the player can perform a dash or attack.  Each action will take a certain amount of beats to perform (e.g. the weak attack takes 1 beat, but the heavy takes 4 beats).

A second problem we received a lot of feedback on was the discontinuity between the strum to attack and hold the strum bar to move.  To solve this problem, we have removed the move such that when the player defeats all the enemies they will automatically move to the next area.  In addition we switched our dash so that it goes a set distance, and made it so all the attacks will move the player to the enemy in the direction they attack like in Batman Arkham Asylum.  In fact Batman is a game we want to emulate with our combat, but in a 1d space.  The goal is to create combat that flows with the beat and that will have the player moving back and forth across the screen to dispatch enemies.

The question throughout all of this is what I have been working on.  The answer to that question is the the beat interface and the AI.  Since we are limiting the player to performing actions on the beat that means we need to do the same for our AI.  They now only attack on the beat, and we now have the ability to spawn AI's on the underlying beat of our game.  The last piece of our game we need to design is to give our AI something to do besides clumping around the player.  The clumping that our AI is currently doing doesn't lead to the gameplay we desire, but we haven't come up with something else for them to do that makes sense.  Time is running out, and we are going to do a brainstorm today and pick the best option.

NOTE: whenever I say things happen on a beat, that has nothing to do with the music playing, rather it is a beat that happens at a pacing that we have defined.

Feedback and stuff

I said last week that I would be posting the feedback that we got on Thursday, yet I have waited because I wasn't exactly happy with the feedback we got.  I would have liked to get more, but the little we got was helpful.  The biggest point brought up is that people want to see some sort of rhythm infused into the game play.  The implementation ideas of the rhythm suggested to us varied from combat to enemy movement.  As of now, we haven't been able to come up with a way to integrate rhythm (in the time we have left), but I am sure we will discuss it today.

personal progress
This sprint didn't have as many exciting features getting added, it was mostly bug fixes and lower level stuff, but I did add a few high level features.  I have most of a tutorial done, it could use some touch ups, and I need some final art, but it is looking decent considering I had to make the engine does things it wasn't programmed to do.  I resurrected the ranged enemy after 2 months of neglect and he is 90% functional, I still need to get the animations to line up with the logic along with a few other small things.  Speaking of the ranged enemy, I also added breakable platforms to the game for them to stand on.  Unfortunately they don't really work because we don't have enough headroom on the camera, so we will have to figure out what to do with that.

Wired xbox 360 guitars on Windows 7

A problem we have been having throughout the development of our game is that we couldn't get our wired guitars to work on Windows 7, they are supposed to be plug and play, but that never worked for us.  I even broke down and spent $50 to buy a used wireless guitar just so I could have a guitar that everyone could use  on their laptops when we are meeting.  Not to say that I didn't try to find out how to do it, I spent several hours, but was unable to find a solution on the internet.  Now that I have found a solution I thought I would write down what I did, and if anyone else has this problem maybe it will help.

(NOTE: I was able to get the both stock Rock Band 1 and the stock Guitar Hero 2 wired guitars to work with this method, any other wired guitar I cannot speak for)

These are the steps I went through:

1. plug your guitar into a usb slot and wait for the driver installation to fail

2.open device manager

3. find the guitar (should have a yellow triangle with an exclamation point showing that the drivers failed to install)

4.right click -> update driver software

5.click browse my computer for driver software

6.click let me pick from a list of drivers on my computer

7.show all devices (its probably in a sublist but idk which one)

8.chose manufacturer to be Microsoft

9.chose model to be Xbox 360 Wireless Controller via Play & Charge Kit (I know it is a wired guitar but that is what works)

10. ignore warning and click yes.

If you don't have the drivers (you should) I believe you can download them from here (not 100% sure which one is needed):

http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us/d/xbox-360-controller-for-windows

or

http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us/d/xbox-360-wireless-controller-for-windows

Quick update on da crunch

Last week I said I would talk about the feedback we got from the Masters students in this post, but our testing has been pushed back to Thursday.  So instead I will just give a short update today, and I will touch on that on Thursday or Friday.

I programmed quite a lot this week, but rather than going over each individual thing I did I am just going to quickly touch on the thing I am most excited about (gotta get this post done before my class starts).  This week I implemented the new music integration we decided upon two weeks ago.  Previously we had cut the plans to integrate music because we couldn't make it sound good, but Scott came up with a good idea where we just change the volume based on how well the player is doing.  When they are doing poorly we also fluctuate the pitch of the music.  Honestly it was one of the easier things I have programmed all semester (just a simple volume = x, pitch = y) but it sounds so cool and I am excited to see music integration of any form in the game.

Even though I did a lot this week, I still need to accomplish 2 major tasks before Thursday.  First I need to precache our enemeis when the level loads.  This will make it such that the first time we spawn an enemy the game doesn't lag.  I have been having issues with the physics engine crashing when doing this, but I am going have to sit down and get it done tonight.  I also need to update the Ranged enemy, he hasn't been touched in 2 months and we have added more dimensions to our game which has broken how he works.  Once again, I have a few ideas in my head on how to get this to work.  Between the impending deadlines/work/classes it is going to be a couple of sleepless nights, but the engineering will be there (now we just need the levels in the game).