Sweet AI stuff

Spring break, more like spring work.  Unfortunately this is how it goes when you have are trying to get stuff done for both work and school in time for GDC.

Anyways I spent most of the break adding the new enemy types.  A shielded enemy and a pogoing enemy.  I am not going to lie they are both way cooler than the enemies we had before.  The shielded enemy you have to knock up in the air twice to destroy his shield, after which he runs away and cowers on the side of the screen.  The pogo enemy, which is my favorite, rocket jumps around the screen until on his last jump he falls and splats on the ground.  He then shoots a few rockets at you and then goes back to jumping.  The new enemy types add more variation in the game play by introducing enemies that aren't just trying to kill you all the time.  As well as adding more horizontal and vertical dimensions to the game.

This is kind of short post but I need to go fix some bugs and submit our game for testing one more time before I start my grand trek to the foggy city of San Francisco.

Getting Closer

Another week another milestone reached.  In the early hours of the morning on Tuesday Heroes of Rock went up for its first testing submission.  This means that people in the xbox live indie games community are going to spend the next week throwing everything they've got at our game to see if it breaks.

The bad news is that I found one game crash on Tuesday afternoon (5 hours of bug fixes wasn't enough), but that is okay we will get it fixed for our next submission.  On the bright side our compressed game executable is only 40.5 MB in size, which is a lot smaller than I thought it would be based on the size of our content folder.  But hey, I am not going to argue at being under the necessary file size to sell the game at $1 like we would like to.

So, as you could probably tell since we have begun testing of our game that means we wre getting close to the final stretch.  I have a list of AI items that still need to be accomplished, because we came up with some new enemy types at the last second.  Normally, I would say it is too late, but our game needs the variation that they will provide and by my measurements we have the time.  Its looking like we will be finished with all of the pieces of our game after spring break (next week) and can then spend the last month polishing and making it look pretty.