This week I only met briefly with the group on Wednesday (30 mins). We discussed what had left to work on for the week.
I worked on finishing the rest of the magician character’s animations this week (4 hours). These were the throw, pick up, block, and heavy move animations.
Total Time: 4.5 hours
Unfortunately, I didn’t get started on other characters or their animations, but I hope to make that up next week.
This week I worked on more art assets. After critique in class, we decided that Dodge the Boulder should be Dodge the Pinball as the object moves more like a pinball. I created a pinball and a cannon for it to shoot out of. We decided that for it to enter the ring, it should be launched from a cannon. For another mini-game I also worked on seek the shiny objects. Making keys that have subtle differences. I also broke up the reputation bar so it is easier to adjust by the programmers. Here are the art assets: Time: 6 hours
I also reworked the arena. The problem with the old arena was that the bottom ropes would stop the players walking so I created a new arena with a detachable front. Time: 2 hours
Next week I want to get Seek the Shiny objects to have a glint. I want to make a pig. I’ll also work on more character animations. And Finally a background for the game.
Positives:
Liking the way the game is looking
Negatives:
Not looking forward to doing more animations.
Total Time: 8 Hours
For this week, my biggest goal was to get a working version of Steal the Spotlight running. As far as that goes, I succeeded surprisingly well. It works great right now, with only one minor hiccup. The way it is structured right now, there is a dark, transparent background that drops down along with the spotlight itself. Currently, the spotlight is layered over the background, but the sprites themselves are behind the dark background. This creates an effect that makes it seem like they aren’t in the spotlight; it is something I plan to fix for next week. I just didn’t have time to learn how Layers worked. Some code snippets follow for my spotlight work:
Please click on it for a better look!
The above was the trigger code for when the player enters the spotlight. It took me a little while to figure out, because I was using the OnTrigger functions instead of the OnTrigger2D functions, so nothing was happening. Once I figured it out though, everything started working beautifully.
Also, I added code that ends the game; it’s pretty simple right now, it just ends the game if either player ends up going to 0 reputation, but it works, and it transfers over to a game over screen for now. Of course, this will most likely change once we get the round structure in; that will probably come in next week. The final bit of work I did this week was on the start screen itself. It is very bear bones right now, but you can move over all the choices, and the game can start from the screen. Overall, I think it works alright. Definitely needs refinement, though.
As far as failures go for this week, one of the big things I wanted to work on was adding some pizzazz to the start of our mini-games. I’ve brainstormed a little bit about how to do it, and I think I have some useful ideas that I plan to implement for this coming week. For instance, in the Dodge the Pinball game, I asked Lukas to create a cannon, which will scoot up to the stage and throw the pinballs onto the arena. For Steal the Spotlight, I’m going to make it dark first, and then have the spotlight come down. Also, for the text that flashes on our game, I plan to have them scroll across the screen in big lettering; that way, it is more obvious to the player what is happening. Our playtest data showed that our players were confused as to what was going on, so I figured the best way to get them up to speed is to be as obnoxious about it as possible.
Time Spent This Week:
3 hours in meetings
5 hours on code
30 minutes on the Burn-Down and other documentation
Total: 8:30
Pros and Cons:
+ Steal the Spotlight is done!
+ Basic navigation structure is set up
+ Game end condition set up
– Mini games still need more of a fun factor
– Don’t have round systems built up yet
– Still need to make it look like the player is actually in the spotlight.
At the end of last week and a lot of this week, I was struggling to get the web build to work. I tried building a new project, different browsers, building on different computers…nothing would work. And Google wasn’t much help. Finally, last night, I took out the microphone and everything worked. It was the best feeling ever. However…this now creates an issue that the microphone supposedly doesn’t work with the web build. I’ll have to do more research into that so either we can implement it, or restructure Tag Team Frenzy. (6 hours)
I did also work on creating the play test survey for the Pre-Alpha and distributing it. Qualtrics is really seamless and it worked pretty well. None of the play testers seemed to have any issues with it, which was great. With the new build working, I was able to distribute our game to friends over the internet. It was pretty cool and opened up our opportunities to get more play testers. (1 hour)
After that was all fixed, I worked on bug fixing. I fixed the aspect ratio so you could see everything in the build. Also, I implemented the new reputation assets and got that working! I also just did some restructuring of the project in general. (4 hours)
A screenshot of the current playing field, with the adjusted aspect ratio and new reputation bars!
I began working on integrating all of the character animations, but I ran out of time. I did get a few of them working, though not checked in yet, and watched a lot of tutorial videos to help me out there. It’s not as difficult as it seems, so it should take a lot less time going forward. (2 hours)
Finally, throughout the week I did some cleanup on the WordPress and TeamworkPM in response to comments on the Organizational Review. I got us a new theme, hopefully way more in line with the vibe of Tag Team Frenzy. I also changed all of the text on here to be more frenzied. (2.5 hours)
Positives:
+ I finally got the build working!!!
+ Animation integration is not as difficult as I thought it would be.
Negatives:
– Microphone seems to break the web build.
– I did not get everything done that I thought I would this week.
Total Time: 15.5 hours
I had a pretty busy week and didn’t get to devote as much to Tag-Team Frenzy as I’d have liked to. I realized that at the pace we were going, there was simply no way we’d get in the initially desired roster of 16 unique characters and so I took the charge to produce a bunch of higher-fidelity concepts that will be easily manipulable, so that everyone can hop on these templates, which were themselves based on the high-fidelity art template I made in Week 3. Talk about convenient!
I spent a good 5 or so hours. doing that, and a good 3 hours doing additional assets and animations for our scoreboard, which we’re still working on implementing into a build.
In addition, I spent an hour finishing up and adding more oomph to my wrestler’s animations. Lovely!
There’s a lot of work to be done in the coming weeks but I feel good about the progress we’ve made as well as the foundation we’re building for our upcoming builds. Next week I should have much more time than I did this week which can go towards getting all these dang assets out the door.
Positives:
+I love the charm we’re bringing to this game!
+Lots of characters have been mapped out
Negatives:
-Not a whole lot of hours put in this week
This week’s total: 9 hours
Goals for next week:
-Finish up minigame assets with the other artists
-Continue churning out characters and animations (lets say 6 fully animated ones, palettes and all. I’m feeling ambitious).
One more week has gone by.
Sunday’s usual meeting ended up not happening, unfortunately, though we did converse through Teamwork PM a bit. I spent 3 hours trying out various lines for the others to say, though they were fairly corny things. For example, “the well-oiled machine that is our team” was something I was considering for Toni to say when she talks about production. “Our cast is intended to be quite vast,” was one of the possibilities I came up with for James to say. And yes, I was in a rhyming mood that day.
On Monday I took some 1 hour to play around with the slides as they were. Tuesday was unfortunately unproductive as the day was spent on other work. Wednesday brought our usual evening meeting, which lasted about 3 hours. I spent that time, all three hours, proofreading and updating the GDD, letting the others focus on other tasks more completely. I also updated the game flowchart and replaced it with a new, digital one.
I took the opportunity to update the asset list to reflect the changes that have been made by the team overall and the new art assets provided by Lukas, Gina, and James. Beyond that, I have no more to report.
Positives:
++Despite not having a Sunday meeting, we still pulled together to make certain everything was getting done.
++Teamwork is coming smoother overall.
Negatives:
–The Sunday meeting did not occur.
–I feel like I could have done more this week than I have done, which has left a bad taste in my mouth so to speak.
–The corny lines I came up with on Monday. Definitely something I’d count a negative in hindsight.
Total Hours Spent: 7 Hours
Goals for Next Week:
==Better lines for the Sales Pitch
==More time spent working on the presentation
Tag Team Frenzy 