Week 2 PPJ – Ryan Smith (Nightlight)

As far as this week goes, what I primarily spent time on was meetings, meetings, and more meetings. Admittedly I only attended two of the meetings, but both were quite productive, and helped me to get a better feeling of where the project was going this term.

The first meeting I attended was the code meeting with Boyd; we both went through the code from Nightlight, and I managed to get a feel for how the project was constructed. I also added some of my own input, and give Boyd some new ideas. Though it was a decently short meeting, I overall think it was a successful one, with both of us coming out ready to rock.

As far as the design group meeting goes, I mainly attended to give a code oriented viewpoint to the group. While I didn’t participate too much in this meeting, I did my best to be helpful when they wanted my opinion. Overall, though I had to leave a bit early, I think the meeting was a success.

Finally, my last bit of work was setting up organizational stuff. I didn’t spend too long on it, but I did set up the Teamwork site with some preliminary tasks for this week.

This Week:

Code Meeting – 1 hour

Design Meeting – 1 hour

Organization – 30 min

Total – 2 hours, 30 min

Pros and Cons:

+ Good meetings overall

+ Got started with organization

– Didn’t get quite enough done

– Could’ve done better with the organizational aspects

Week 11 PPJ – Ryan Smith

This was the final week! Lots of final bug fixing touches were taken care of. I managed to fix multiple reputation issues left over from the character select change, including the light move and heavy move, as well as the make some noise mini game. I also finally implemented the options screen; now all of the sliders actually do things! I also got some help from Boyd, and managed to at least minimize the resolution issues.

The most important thing I did this week, however, was create our demo build for the presentation. This took far more work than I expected, and required a lot of changes. Basically, to prepare it, I had to create a boolean variable that defined whether or not we are in the demo build, or the normal build. It took a lot of bug testing, but I managed to finish it. We have Catch the Pig, Dodge the Pinball, and Make Some Noise in the build. Dodge the Junk was supposed to be in there, but I wasn’t able to test if it was working properly due to some issues with mic testing. Below is some code related to the demo changes:

if(gameController.GetComponent<MiniGameTimer>().demoOn){
gameController.GetComponent<MiniGameTimer> ().demoEndMiniGame ();
Destroy (this.gameObject);
}
else{
gameController.GetComponent<MiniGameTimer> ().endMiniGame ();
Destroy (this.gameObject);
}

We also met together to tidy up the presentation and make sure everyone knew what we were doing. We spent a lot of time working it out, and I think we’re ready to go!

Time Spent This Week

Bug fixes – 3 hours

Demo build – 4 hours

Meeting – 5 hours

Total time this week – 12 hours

 

Pros and Cons

+ Lots of bug fixes!

+ Demo build is finished

– Dodge the Junk didn’t properly make it into the demo build

Toni Ruffo – Week 11 PPJ

Wow, I can’t believe this is finally all over! What a wonderful and crazy eleven weeks it has been. This week has been SO FRENZIED. I had a lot of finals earlier in the week, so everything was kind of last minute. But we got everything done and it’s great.

First things first, play test survey. As always. Pretty much the same survey! For some reason people are still using the same survey as last week… but we were able to use that data in our final results, so that was good. (30 minutes)

We met as a team on Wednesday night and Thursday morning to get everything together, which really helped! I think that our practice of the sell pitch this week went really well!! A new slide has been added for me to discuss and am excited to show it off. (8 hours)

A lot of the rest of what I was doing was documentation. I spent a lot of time talking to the team about what we should write and then completed the following:

• Organization Review (1 hour 30 minutes)
• All Communication Documentation (30 minutes)
• Playtest Analysis (1 hour 30 minutes)
• Post-Mortem (2 hours)

I also worked on some bug fixes and code changes!!

• Round Timer (1 hour)
• Poof Animation (30 minutes)
• Plus/Minus Reputation Animation (30 minutes)
• Fix Reputation Arrow Levels (15 minutes)
• Fix Credits Screen (45 minutes)
• Add Crowd & Other Missing Assets (30 minutes)

I feel like I don’t have a whole lot to say this week, everything was fairly straightforward. We all sat down and did what we had to do–no nonsense!! :) I hope that we do really well at our presentation today and that everyone votes for Tag Team Frenzy! I have had a great time working on this project.

Positives:

+ Our game is finally finished!!

+ The sell pitch is really improving.

+ Everything has really come together. :)

Negatives:

– We did scrap some things, like the crowd changing color.

Total Time: 17 hours and 30 minutes

Week 10 PPJ – Ryan Smith

This week, my primary goal was to get some bug fixes in. Earlier in the week, I had to take care of some small bugs with reputation changes never registering. This was happening with the Dodge the Pinball mini game primarily, but there were some slight issues with Steal the Spotlight as well. Those fixes went through fine, and we were able to create a proper build for our playtesters.

Other than the above, there were only a couple of other issues I had to fix. First, I FINALLY have Steal the Spotlight’s layers working; I had found out that when the spotlight is destroyed, the trigger events don’t go off, so the character sprites were staying at the same z position they were in while in the spotlight. So, I introduced some logic after the destruction of the spotlight to change the characters back to their original position after the spotlight dies, if they were still in it. The snippet is below:

Vector3 currentSpotP1 = player1.transform.position;
if(currentSpotP1.z == -2.5){
currentSpotP1.z += 2;
}
player1.transform.position = currentSpotP1;
Vector3 currentSpotP2 = player2.transform.position;
if(currentSpotP2.z == -2.5){
currentSpotP2.z += 2;
}
player2.transform.position = currentSpotP2;

I also changed the Dodge the Junk junk objects to have different speeds. Also, per suggestions, the pig now moves fast. With the other changes that were added in this week, I think that the mini game is a hell of a lot of fun now, and actually is a bit of a challenge.

As far as failures for this week go, there was one big thing that I couldn’t get to: our player interaction is currently really buggy. It needs a lot of changes, and I just didn’t have the time to get to them.

Time Spent This Week:

Bug fixes – 3 hours

Team meetings – 2 hours

Total – 5 hours

Pros and Cons:

+ Lots of really good bug fixes.

– Couldn’t get the time to work on player interaction.

Week 10 PPJ – Toni Ruffo

Hey! This is my second-to-last PPJ because next week I am graduating!!!!! These five years have been quite the adventure. But enough about that, let’s get to my week in Tag Team Frenzy!

We were off to a rough start this week. Our build last week was not up to our expectations and we spent a lot of this week getting it ready to do playtesting for last week, which was rough… As I type this, I’m eagerly pushing for people to be our last few playtesters. But it will work out!

Anyway, so I did the play test survey and updated the links early as usual, even though I was not ready to release the build to our testers. The survey was pretty much the same as last time, since we are just mostly in bug fix mode and not adding many new features. (30 minutes)

I did also fix a lot of the bugs assigned to me really early in the week, which was neat and gave me more opportunities to do other things later on. Here are some of the bugs I fixed:

• Fix Missing Assets (1 hour)
• Fix Team Color Sprites (1 hour 30 minutes)
• Fix Second Player Reputation Bug (45 minutes)
• Remove Bug in Character Select Menu That Goes Back to Red Team Again (45 minutes)
• Sound Bars Are Backwards (5 minutes)
• Game Never Ends (45 minutes)

At some point in between these bugs, I met with the team on Sunday. We mostly just discussed things that needed to get done and worked together on things. (2 hours)

I also did some sell pitch stuff! I updated the handout for the sell pitch and added more images to it, to give it more “frenzy” while still providing useful information. (30 minutes) I also met with the team on Wednesday night to practice the sell pitch for our presentation today. I’m feeling less confident in my lines than I did last week, for some reason, but I’m sure it will be okay. I’ll need to practice a lot more for our final. (2 hours)

Additionally, I’ve spent some time importing new assets into the build and fixing some bugs that came up during the play testing this week. (4 hours)

Here are some of the bugs that came up:

• Pinball destroys reputation
• Players keep moving while round changes
• Some of the text and UI in the menus is cut off

Finally, for administration, I’ve updated the Scrum presentation with the burndown chart and gantt charts for this week. Here’s a bit of our gantt chart! I think we are getting better at estimations. (25 minutes)

A snippet of our gantt chart this week!

Total Time: 14 hours 15 minutes

Positives:

+ We fixed the really buggy build from last week! Hooray!

+ All of our assets are coming in nicely.

Negatives:

– It was REALLY tough to get playtests this week.

– I did not get to controller input… Whoops.

Week 9 PPJ – Ryan Smith

For this week, I had one big challenge: finishing character select. As it stands, it works! It took a lot of work, because I wanted to try and keep the integrity of our code intact, but as it was, it was impossible to do without compromising it. However, the character select works (aside from a few minor bugs once you get in game), and I even made it more obvious which team was picking their character. My problem with how character select was going was that we were trying to add prefabs to pre-existing game objects. However, I figured out that this was impossible to do, so instead, we modified our code to just check for which character it is impacting; as such, the code looks rough and hard to read. An example is below:

if (GameObject.Find (“CharacterSelectMover”).gameObject.GetComponent<CharacterInputStore>().player1 == 1) {
player1 = GameObject.Find (“MagicianPlayer1(Clone)”);
}
if (GameObject.Find (“CharacterSelectMover”).gameObject.GetComponent<CharacterInputStore>().player1 == 2) {
player1 = GameObject.Find (“LuchadorPlayer1(Clone)”);
}
if (GameObject.Find (“CharacterSelectMover”).gameObject.GetComponent<CharacterInputStore>().player1 == 3) {
player1 = GameObject.Find (“DogPlayer1(Clone)”);
}
if (GameObject.Find (“CharacterSelectMover”).gameObject.GetComponent<CharacterInputStore>().player1 == 4) {
player1 = GameObject.Find (“SpacePiratePlayer1(Clone)”);
}

The setup for creating an object that references the player

Other than that, I fixed two bugs. Specifically, the pinball physics now make actual sense. Some code related to it is below. Also, the spotlight is finally showing the players inside it! It’s a miracle! Here is the pinball physics code:

if (bounced) {
verSpeed = Random.Range (20, 30);
bool isNeg = false;
if(GameObject.Find(“Pinball(Clone)”).transform.position.y > 0){
verSpeed = verSpeed * -1;
}
if(GameObject.Find(“Pinball(Clone)”).transform.position.x > 22.1){
isNeg = true;
}
if(GameObject.Find(“Pinball(Clone)”).transform.position.x < -48){
isNeg = true;
}
if(player1Bounce){
isNeg = true;
player1Bounce = false;
}
if(player2Bounce){
isNeg = true;
player2Bounce = false;
}
if(isNeg){
horSpeed = horSpeed * -1;
isNeg = false;
}
bounced = false;
}

The above code works by taking a generic speed for the x-axis and inverting it when it hits a player or the edges of the playing field.

The other stuff I did this week involved working on the sell pitch; I both helped to renovate it, as well as practice it with the team. Overall, I think it was a pretty successful week, and besides a few small bugs, everything works! However, I was unable to get to the Dodge the Junk mini game; we added the pig as one of the obstacles to dodge, but unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to get to creating random speeds.

Time Spent This Week:

Character Select and bug fixes – 4 hours

Updating sell pitch – 2 hours

Group meeting/sell pitch practice – 2 hours

Pros and Cons:

+ Character select is finished!

+ Multiple important bugs fixed

– Character select still has some bugs

– Still wasn’t able to spice up Dodge the Junk

Week 9 PPJ – Toni Ruffo

Wow, we are almost done! This week was our first beta build and it was kind of crazy.

Typical administration stuff: I created the playtest survey and updated the links and whatnot. The survey was pretty similar to last week’s since we haven’t drastically changed anything about the game. I did change some of the wording for the questions in hopes that it’s more clear to our testers. We seemed to get some good results, but it was tough getting 24 testers this week. I’m scared for getting 30 and 36. (30 minutes)

Over the weekend, I added some sounds for players’ light moves and heavy moves, as well as changed some of the existing sounds to make more sense or be more realistic. Here are the sounds I added/changed:

• Pinball sound (15 minutes)
• Luchador light move & heavy move (20 minutes)
• Magician light move & heavy move (20 minutes)
• Dog light move & heavy move (20 minutes)
• Space Pirate light move & heavy move (20 minutes)
• Individual sounds for Dodge the Junk objects (40 minutes)

I think the Space Pirate sounds in particular are really cool, here are some snippets:

Light Move  ~  Heavy Move

On Monday, I met with Ryan and John to work on the Sell Pitch. That was really productive and we made a lot of changes. (2 hours) We also determined that we should take out some of the boring administrative stuff (like target audience and platform) and hand out a one-pager prior to the presentation. So I worked on creating that and will bring it in this week. (15 minutes)

And then on Wednesday, the whole team met to practice our changes for the Sell Pitch. We worked out the kinks in our script and I am hopeful that our presentation is going to go well! (3 hours)

Interspersed between those meetings, I worked on creating the scripts and prefabs for our new characters, the Dog and the Space Pirate. I made some changes to existing scripts for the Luchador and Magician to allow for character selection from the main screen, instead of always being the Luchador and the Magician. Ryan is taking care of actually implementing these changes, though. (20 minutes)

The rest of my time was spent on bug fixing. I didn’t finish everything I set out to in this category, but I took care of all of the important stuff. These are the fixes I got done:

• Check collisions on Dodge the Junk (30 minutes)
• Fix animation speeds (1 hour)
• Fix knockback knocking players out of the ring (30 minutes)
• Add more keys & add key twinkle (15 minutes)
• Increase frequency of mini games (10 minutes)
• Don’t allow mini games to spawn same 2 in a row (15 minutes)
• Shorten rounds to 1 minute each (5 minutes)

I just want to go into some quick detail about the changes I made to Seek the Shiny. I added a twinkle to each of the keys (provided by Lukas). The shiny key displays a gold twinkle, while the others have a slightly duller silver twinkle. It’s a little difficult to see, which is the idea. This way, players will know which one to get, but they have to look for it. And I have doubled the amount of keys in the arena. Here is a screenshot of what it looks like now:

The new and improved Seek the Shiny!

Positives:

+ We are wrapping up! I feel like our game is feeling almost complete.

+ We did great work on our Sell Pitch this week.

Negatives:

– It’s difficult to get a lot of playtesters.

– I did not get everything done. As usual. :/

Total time: 11 hours and 5 minutes

Week 8 PPJ – Ryan Smith

For this week, I had a number of things that I wanted to get done. They were mostly small stuff, but there was quite a bit of it, so it took me a bit to get them all done. The first task that I had to figure out was how to get our menus put together. Right now, you can travel between all of the menus! The system was a snap to put together, just took a little bit of time to build. In addition, I also worked on getting our first music track together. Right now, we have one track that loops over our menu screens; we have plans to create a new track for the actual gameplay portion. The process of getting the soundtrack to stay consistent over most screens was actually pretty complex; I had to learn how to use a new function, the DontDestoryOnLoad function. However, I was having issues where it would spawn a new soundtrack object whenever you returned to the main screen. Looking around, I found out that it when the opening screen loaded, it combined a reinstantiated soundtrack object with the soundtrack that hasn’t been destroyed. As such, whenever the game transitions back to the opening menu, this code was used to destroy the old soundtrack:

GameObject music = GameObject.Find (“Soundtrack”);
if (music) {
Destroy(music);
}

The biggest task I had to accomplish this week was creating our character select screen. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to figure out how exactly we wanted to implement everything; that, in combination with some assets getting to us a bit later than expected, we couldn’t get the full version implemented. However, I was able to setup the framework for it, and I believe that it will only take an hour to finish implementing once all of the animations are compiled.

The final piece that I worked on was fixing up the text for our mini games. Right now, it displays on the Jumbotron and scrolls left to right down it. It is also much larger, and can actually be read, as opposed to our first implementations of it.

There were also a couple of small bugs I fixed as well, such as the game ending when a player reached zero rep, as well as fixing the round text going behind the ring itself. However, the one bug fix that has been going on forever (the spotlight problem), still hasn’t been fixed. I’m kind of embarrassed about it, actually.

Time spent:

Menus – 2 hours

Music – 1.5 hours

Character Select – 1.5 hours

Meetings – 1.5 hours

Total – 6.5 hours

Pros and cons:

+ Menus are fully implemented

+ Fixed a decent amount of bugs

– Character select not fully implemented

– Still haven’t finished the spotlight problem

Week 8 PPJ – Toni Ruffo

Man, this week was a crazy week for me. Between bug fixing, putting in extra time at my job, and other coursework, I didn’t get as much done as I had hoped. But I still got a lot done!

As usual, I worked on the play test survey on Saturday and got that up and running for people to start testing. This was the first “full” play test that we had, so it was a long survey but we got a lot of feedback. In addition, I added some new questions! Our data was pretty good, but I also have some ideas about how to make the survey better next week to get even better results. (25 minutes)

One of our new questions was prompting the user to select 5 adjectives that describe Tag Team Frenzy. We got a lot of responses for adjectives that we were aiming for (Entertaining, Frenzied, Party, Silly, Loud) but also some not so great ones (Boring, Dry, Relaxed, Calm). I’m really confused about the user who selected “Dark” for our game, but I digress.

We met on Sunday for a little bit, just to get some stuff organized for the tasks that were coming up for the rest of the week. I’ve been encouraging the team more and more to use more accurate estimations and not just set the time for a task for the entire week. I think it’s going well! (1 hour)

Here’s a snippet of the gantt chart from this week, showing that not all of our tasks last the entire week:

Related to play testing, I held a very mild party on Monday to get people to play test our game in a party setting! These people were my roommates, who have made me play test their games before, so they had no choice. :)  At first it was super fun but after a few rounds the hype kind of died down. I have a lot of notes that I posted onto TeamworkPM here. I hope to get them to play again next week when there are less bugs. (1 hour)

Throughout the week I’ve done some bug fixes. This build was reaaaaallyy buggy. Here’s a general list of the fixes I did this week:

• Remove microphone authorization request for standalone builds (15 minutes)
• Knock back other player when you use a light move or heavy move (45 minutes)
• Implement reputation for Make Some Noise mini game (30 minutes)
• Add colliders and change layers on Make Some Noise arrows (30 minutes)
• Reduce the points gained per taunt (15 minutes)
• Fix mini game timer causing mini games to end early (15 minutes)

I intended to fix some other bugs as well, but I didn’t get to them this week. I don’t think they are the biggest issues, though, so I will work on them next week.

Also, I implemented some sound effects!! I added a sound for a wrestling bell ringing at the beginning of each round, and “hit” sounds for light move and heavy moves. I started adding a sound effect for the pig to squeal when it is caught, but it is not functioning properly right now. Maybe I’ll  make it alternate between squealing and oinking when it collides with things. (1 hour)

We met again Wednesday night, as we do each week. This wasn’t the most productive meeting for me, but I got people tp play test and I did administrative tasks! I was waiting on some animations before I could do some more work. But it was a good meeting and we worked on the scrum and looked at the sell pitch a little bit. (3 hours)

Afterwords, I started creating two of the new characters in the game–Space Pirate and Dog! The assets from Gina and James look great. I hooked up their animations and created prefabs for these characters. However, their scripts are not set up yet.. We intended to have that this week but I just ran out of time because I had to work extra. :( I intend to work diligently over the holiday this weekend to get this implemented further. (50 minutes)

Lastly, I’ve been working on some scrum stuff intermittently, such as the burndown chart and the gantt chart. Not much stuff there, just administration. (20 minutes)

Positives:

+ We have music and more sounds, it’s bringing things together!!

+ People seemed to like our game better this week. :)

Negatives:

– I did not finish all of my things this week. :/

– We might be a little behind on where we’re supposed to be for beta… but we did end up adding a lot of items during the week and I think that contributed to the issue.

Total Time: 10 hours and 5 minutes

Week 7 – Ryan Smith

For this week, the most important thing for us was to get all of the mini games into first alpha build. As it stands, that is a success! I personally finished up Dodge the Junk for this week. In the state it is in, I think it feels pretty good. However, my initial plan was to try and make it seem like it was thrown as opposed just crossing the screen (which is what it is currently doing). I couldn’t get it working, but I plan to try some more in the future to get it to have a proper throwing angle.

In addition, I worked on two other things: the rounds system, as well as a new build of our menu system. Right now, I had the assets for our opening screen and our About screen (in this case, a basic idea for our controls), so you are able to view the controls from the main menu, and navigate back. Also, instead of the 0 rep lose condition for the last few builds, we now have our rounds system in place. Thus, the game now ends after three 2 minute rounds. It then goes to the final game screen (which still needs a little work).

Below is some code from the round transition:

if (roundTransition == false && roundTimer == 120) {
roundTimer = 0;
roundTransition = true;
canMove = false;
roundCount++;
if(roundCount == 2){
clone = Instantiate(round2Text) as Transform;
}
else if(roundCount == 3){
clone = Instantiate(round3Text) as Transform;
}
}
if (roundTransition == true && betweenTimer == 5) {
betweenTimer = 0;
roundTransition = false;
canMove = true;
}

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make anything more exciting as far as the mini games go; I was too focused on finishing up our build. However, for next week, I hope to make everything more exciting and clear.

Dodge the Junk: 3 hours

Menus and Rounds: 2 hours

Meetings: 3 hours

Total work for this week: 8 hours

Pros and Cons

+ Finished Dodge the Junk!

+ Basic Round system and menus are up

– Unable to make mini game starts more exciting

– Dodge the Junk doesn’t have throwing arcs like I envisioned