Tuesday lecture

For tuesday, I had finished the progression and collision detection of weak points for the space station. I also started an easy to use message system so people could simply give the message manager the string they want to display and perform basic functions to them. For next time I will continue to finalize the space station and namely the spawning of enemy ships and making sure there are no performance issues when ported to the xbox. I'm currently waiting for the model to have the appropriate information so I can spawn the enemies.

For Thursday March 17...

A few people from the industry as well as faculty members from the U came to playtest our game and gave us feedback. Most of our problems tend to be user interface related and mainly attributed to not giving enough information to the player about the current state of the world. Some ideas include a message system to provide hints, notifying what players need to do in arcade mode, etc.

As for my work...I'm still mainly bottlenecked by not having fully finished models but game logic wise, I'm quite far along. I am at the point where the space station simply needs to put some turrets(already implemented for capital ships) and some explosion effects when a certain part of the space station is destroyed. As of right now I need to add the moving animation of the lower core to reveal the main weakpoint once the two rings of the space station are destroyed.

Tuesday's status

For tuesday I continued to help fix some of the bugs and made some gameplay tweaks. Most importantly, I got the restart functionality to work. For next time, I've notified the team that I'll be studying for a midterm so I will not be able to get any significant fixes done. I do plan to have the space station done as soon as possible, and I'm aiming for next Wednesday or Thursday, possibly sooner if I don't run into any major problems. Our game is submitted on App Hub on tuesday and we hope to get another revision up either next tuesday or once the space station is in the game.

As for lecture, Roger went over what he learned during his visit to GDC and gave us advice on how to fully maximize the experience if we are to visit GDC. We were also told that there will be panelists on Thursday to give us advice on our game.

submission week

I've been helping with the completion of the arcade mode the past week. It is now a lot more polished and ready to be submitted by tuesday. The Space Station model is still not fully ready and will be left out of the first submission. For the remaining days until submission, I will continue to add polish and try to fix obvious bugs that we encounter. All the bosses are working like they should and transitions correctly.

Close to submission

I've been working on the space station logic still and had to go through several iterations of the implementation. One of the problem I noticed after my first implementation was whether or not the boss fight would be fun. Our initial plan was simply to have a space station with various rings around it which can be shot off and a core point will be exposes. Upon destroying the core point, the boss is defeated. The problem with this is that it poses nearly no challenge to the player especially since the previous cap ships required more thinking and strategy. So now the station is planned so that a shield will encapsulate the space station and the user must disable it temporarily and shoot the rings of the space station and its core down. The outer ring must be destroyed first, followed by the inner ring, and then the core point. The shield will reactivate after a certain point and will push the player back out of the shield region. I'm also impeded in testing the space station in actual in game environment because the models for the different parts are still not completed.

beta cont.

I've been working on the code for the space station and have a lot of the structure complete. I am still waiting for the modelers to finish creating the model and texture it. Once that is complete, I'll be able to test and make sure the space station is working correctly and that the bounding spheres are in the correct location and uses the correct size.